and yet if we are to get away at
all, it is safer to go now."

In order to save time for our eastern trip, we went through Chicago
almost without stopping, and upon reaching New York, took the same suite
of rooms on Fifteenth Street in which we had lived the previous year. In
an hour we were settled.

My brother, who was playing an engagement in the city, came at once to
inquire about the old folks and I gave a good report. "Mother has her
ups and downs," I explained, "but she is very comfortable in her new
rooms. Of course she misses her sons and her new daughter--I am not
sure, but she misses the new daughter more than she misses you and me,
but we shall soon return to her."

_The Eagle's Heart_, which had been running with favor as a serial, was
just being published in book form, and we were in high hopes of it.

At the same time the Century Company was preparing to issue _Her
Mountain Lover_, which had already been printed in the magazine.
Altogether my presence in New York seemed opportune, if not actually
necessary, a fact which I made much of in writing to the old folks in
the West.

Gilder, who met me on the street soon after our arrival in New York,
spoke to me in praise of _Her Mountain Lover_. "I predict a great
success for it. It has beauty----" here he smiled. "I am always
preaching 'beauty' to you, but you need it! You should remember that the
writing which is beautiful is the writing which lasts."

He was looking thin and bent and gray, and I experienced a keen pang of
fear. "Gilder is growing old," I thought, and this feeling of change was
deepened a few days later by the death of Charles Dudley Warner.

"The older literary men, the Writers who have been my guides and my
exemplars, are dropping away! I am no longer 'a young and promising
novelist.' It is time I delivered my message--if I have any," I reminded
myself, with a realization that I was now in the mid-ranks, pushed on by
younger and more vigorous authors. Frank Norris and Stewart Edward White
were crowding close upon my lagging heels. With this in my thought I got
out my manuscript and set to work.

I would have been entirely happy in the midst of many delightful
meetings with my fellow craftsmen had it not been for a growing sense
of anxiety concerning my mother's condition. Father's brief notes were
not reassuring. "Your mother needs you," he said, in effect, and I began
to plan our return. "We have a few engagements," I wrote, "but