rd Mr. Alison joining that fatal adjective to his pet _Wandering
Stars_....

It may be thought peculiar that Helena should have believed so easily;
but as she sat there and gazed out through unseeing eyes, nothing of
any weight stood in the other balance.

When she had married him, proud of his name, she was a simple girl.
She had not read a word of his until she was engaged: and how could she
judge after that, if she had been the best of critics? Then, once his
wife--well, who would tell her anyhow? Ally, she knew, had never meant
to and she liked him better than she had, for it. Hubert was so
contemptuous about his paintings, that she knew he must have often felt
the obvious temptation to revenge.

Hubert, in fact, had been so scornful about everybody else's work. In
Literature--she now recalled--she had relied entirely on his estimates.
Mr. Alison, till now, had said he really was no judge of books and told
her she must ask her husband.... She had got the idea that Hubert's
work was of the best sort, the most properly artistic, and when she
wondered why it did not make more money, he had said that it was too
good....

Now with a shock that somehow loosened far more than merely her ideas
on books, this young wife learnt that the great Hubert Brett, with all
his endless moods--the house revolving round his inspiration--only
created novels which were "popular" in class, yet nearly always failed
to sell!

She had not of course got the matter quite so definite as that in her
own mind, when there came to her ears the warning sound of his door
opening. There were no sheets of manuscript to hide to-day, but she
put down a cedar pen-holder which had grown very ragged at the top in a
half-hour.

"Well," she said, leaping up and forcing herself, like a trained wife,
to be cheery, "what success to-day?" She always asked him that. He
liked it.

Hubert was not satisfied to-day. "Rotten," he said; "absolutely
rotten. That idiot Lily had put all the candle-sticks and things the
wrong way round on my writing-desk and I'd to move them all, just when
I got there feeling in the mood to work."

"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear," she answered humbly. "I will tell her." She
knew, you see, the whole of a wife's duty now.

"Don't worry about that, my dear," he said without much conviction;
"but these housemaids seem to think an artist is a sort of navvy who
only wants a pen and everything's all right. They don't seem to
unde