desk as he came in, and, jumping up at sight of him, she came
to meet him with an outstretched hand.

"Congratulate me," she said. "The book is finished and accepted.
Strangmans have taken it. They took only a week to decide. I am wild
with pride and joy. Maurice Ilbert is one of their readers. He got it to
read and recommended it enthusiastically. They are to publish it in
June. Wasn't it generous of him, because there is so little of it he can
agree with?"

"Oh, Ilbert's conscience is pretty elastic, I should say, and he can
agree with many things," Sir Robin answered. He felt vaguely annoyed
that Ilbert should have had anything to do with Mary or her book. Ilbert
was one of the younger school of Tories, a free-lance he called himself,
handsome, conceited, immensely clever, a golden youth with an air of
Oxford and the Schools added to him. He was one of the youngest members
of Parliament, and was gifted with a dazzling and impertinent wit. Sir
Robin had occasionally smarted under Ilbert's sallies. He was a target
for them, with his serious and simple views, his lean air of Don
Quixote.

Mary looked at him reproachfully, as though the speech grieved her.

"He is very generous," she repeated. "He has come to see me. I found him
most sympathetic. It is not a question of parties. He thinks awfully
well of the book. He says it will stir the public conscience. To be
sure, it is written out of experience, just the plain story of things as
they are. I have learned so much since I began this work."

He had got over his first ill-temper, and now he spoke gently.

"I am sure it is a good book," he said. "I have always felt that you
would make a good book of it because you know. Ilbert is a very capable
critic."

He did Ilbert justice with some difficulty. He had a sharp thought of
Ilbert coming in and out as he had been used to, when he should come no
more. For the first time in his life, which had had no room for
self-consciousness, he compared himself with another man, handsome,
debonair, and remembered the lean visage over which mornings he passed
the razor, dark, lantern-jawed, almost grotesque. It was the only aspect
of himself he knew, the one which was presented to him when he shaved.

"Now you are like yourself," Mary said sweetly. "It was not like you to
throw cold water on my pleasure."

He turned away his head from her reconciled eyes. She was making what he
had come to say doubly hard for him.

"I want t