l shuffle and shamble away out of one's sight.

As soon as the morning came, I left the hotel without having tried the
vain attempt of sleep, and did not return to it till the evening. At
noon I called upon the publisher and explained that an unfortunate
accident had occurred, and the MS. I had received back from him
yesterday had been destroyed.

At that he beamed upon me blandly, and remarked that such a thing was
unfortunate, but that without doubt M'sieur would make all haste to
re-copy it, and would let him have a new draft as soon as possible.

I shook my head, feeling my lips and throat grow dry as I answered--

"That which you had was the original, not a copy. I have no copy of it
from which I can replace it."

"But M'sieur will certainly have his notes, his private work, his first
scheme?"

"None. I do not work in that way. There is not a scrap of paper
relative to it anywhere."

Upon this the publisher rose, looked at me in a long silence, and then
said in an icy tone,--

"Then M'sieur wishes me to understand that he does not intend to allow
our firm to publish his work at all?"

I flushed at the insult his words contained. They practically intimated
that he thought the whole thing an invention, and that I was going to
give the MS. elsewhere. I got up too, and said--

"I have told you the MS. is destroyed, and I have no means of
reproducing it, therefore it is impossible for it to be brought out by
your or any other firm."

The man before me merely raised his shoulders over his ears, bowed,
spread out the palms of his hands, raised his eyebrows, and muttered,--

"Comme vous voulez, M'sieur."

Confound him! was he a liar that he assumed me to be one. There was
nothing to do but to bow and leave.

As I walked out of his office into the fresh, sparkling, morning
sunlight, life to me had a very bitter savour. I walked through the
streets till I felt tired in every muscle. Then I sat thinking on a
bench in a green corner of the Champs Elysees, watching absently the
sun patches jump from leaf to neighbouring leaf as the wind elevated
and depressed them, and trying to mentally seize upon and analyse this
vile, low impulse of another man's envy.

It was dark when I came back to the hotel. When I came up to my room I
was surprised to see quite a little crowd of figures clustered round my
door, all talking at once in their shrill French tones, all
gesticulating at each other as if about to tear off ea