al instruction to the printer, and meant that one line
of space should be left clear. The genius who had the copy in hand put
the lover's speech in type correctly, and then, setting it out as if it
were a line of verse, he gave me--

'Not one, dear Frank, not one white line!'

* * * * *

It was a custom in the printing office to suspend a leather medal by a
leather bootlace round the neck of the man who had achieved the prize
_betise_ of the year. It was somewhere about midsummer at this time, but
it was instantly and unanimously resolved that nothing better than this
would or could be done by anybody. The compositors performed what they
called a 'jerry' in the blunderer's honour, and invested him, after an
animated fight, with the medal.

'Grace Forbeach' has been dead and buried for very nearly a score of
years. It never saw book form, and I was never anxious that it should do
so, but as _it_ had grown out of 'Marsh Hall,' so my first book grew out
of it, and, oddly enough, not only my first, but my second and my third.
'Joseph's Coat,' which made my fortune, and gave me such literary
standing as I have, was built on one episode of that abortive story, and
'Val Strange' was constructed and written to lead up to the episode of
the attempted suicide on Welbeck Head, which had formed the culminating
point in the poem.

[Illustration: THEY INVESTED HIM WITH THE MEDAL]

When I got to London I determined to try my hand anew, and, having
learned by failure something more than success could ever have taught
me, I built up my scheme before I started on my book. Having come to
utter grief for want of a scheme to work on, I ran, in my eagerness to
avoid that fault, into the opposite extreme, and built an iron-bound
plot, which afterwards cost me very many weeks of unnecessary and
unvalued labour. I am quite sure that no reader of 'A Life's Atonement'
ever guessed that the author took one tithe, or even one-twentieth part,
of the trouble it actually cost to weave the two strands of its
narrative together. I divided my story into thirty-six chapters. Twelve
of these were autobiographical, in the sense that they were supposed to
be written by the hero in person. The remaining twenty-four were
historical, purporting to be written, that is, by an impersonal author.
The autobiographical portions necessarily began in the childhood of the
narrator, and between them and the 'History' there was a c