er was found willing to
make them into a book, hope revived in him.

It was but short-lived. The few reviews that reached him contained
nothing but ridicule. So he had no place even as a literary hack!

He was living in Paris at the time in a noisy, evil-smelling street
leading out of the Quai Saint-Michel. He thought of Chatterton, and
would loaf on the bridges looking down into the river where the drowned
lights twinkled.

And then one day there came to him a letter, sent on to him from the
publisher of his one book. It was signed "Sylvia," nothing else, and
bore no address. Matthew picked up the envelope. The postmark was
"London, S.E."

It was a childish letter. A prosperous, well-fed genius, familiar with
such, might have smiled at it. To Matthew in his despair it brought
healing. She had found the book lying in an empty railway carriage;
and undeterred by moral scruples had taken it home with her. It had
remained forgotten for a time, until when the end really seemed to have
come her hand by chance had fallen on it. She fancied some kind little
wandering spirit--the spirit perhaps of someone who had known what it
was to be lonely and very sad and just about broken almost--must have
manoeuvred the whole thing. It had seemed to her as though some strong
and gentle hand had been laid upon her in the darkness. She no longer
felt friendless. And so on.

The book, he remembered, contained a reference to the magazine in which
the sketches had first appeared. She would be sure to have noticed
this. He would send her his answer. He drew his chair up to the
flimsy table, and all that night he wrote.

He did not have to think. It came to him, and for the first time since
the beginning of things he had no fear of its not being accepted. It
was mostly about himself, and the rest was about her, but to most of
those who read it two months later it seemed to be about themselves.
The editor wrote a charming letter, thanking him for it; but at the
time the chief thing that worried him was whether "Sylvia" had seen it.
He waited anxiously for a few weeks, and then received her second
letter. It was a more womanly letter than the first. She had
understood the story, and her words of thanks almost conveyed to him
the flush of pleasure with which she had read it. His friendship, she
confessed, would be very sweet to her, and still more delightful the
thought that he had need of her: that she also had someth