of art critic, when
one of those sudden pauses which seem to drop softly between intimate
friends followed his concluding speech. Verity held up her finger with
the hackneyed allusion to a passing angel, at which Malcolm laughed
scornfully.

"You are too poetical, my dear Verity," he observed; "it was no
white-robed celestial vision brushing past us in the twilight and
fanning us with plumed and balmy wings; the gliding shadow that moved
between us was merely the guardian genius who presides over my destiny.
But as he passed I touched his mantle"--and here Malcolm regarded his
audience with infinite meaning.

No one hazarded an observation. Amias, who had been filling his pipe
with tobacco, looked at it longingly and returned it to his pocket.
This process he repeated at intervals from sheer force of habit. With
his pipe alight he was an ideal listener; without it his attention
wandered and grew drowsy. But Malcolm, wrapt up in his own visionary
conceits, did not see the pathos of the action.

He was on his favourite hobby-horse--life, and its limitations, its
enforced denials and futile sacrifices, was opening before his eyes.

"I am going to write a book," he announced abruptly. "I mean to take
the world by storm--to say my say--for once. It will not be a novel.
The public is inundated by the flood of fiction that threatens to
engulf it. We have biographies by the ton, in two, three, or four
volumes; in every public place in England we set up our golden image,
and we bid men, women, and children fall down and do it homage.
Hero-worship is our favourite cult; woe to that man who refuses to burn
incense before it!"

"I suppose you intend to bring out a volume of essays?" queried Amias
lazily.

"No, my dear fellow," returned Malcolm rather mendaciously, for he was
planning a series of essays at that very time. "No trifles and
syllabubs for me--froth above and sweetness and jam beneath. Every one
writes essays nowadays, and tries to stir with his little Gulliver pen
the yeasty foam raised by a Carlyle or an Emerson. One might as well
watch the effort of a small hairy caterpillar to follow in the wake of
a sea-serpent. Oh ye gods and little fishes, could anything be more
grotesque!"

"But the book?" growled Amias, with a surreptitious glance at his pipe.

"Oh, the book," returned Malcolm loftily, "it is a sudden inspiration,
but I feel the grip of my Frankenstein already; I have not yet let go
the mantle of my