see there was something wrong with you. All this
morning you've had something on your chest. I thought it was the
biscuits, of course; but it wasn't, eh?"

"It was not."

"Then what was it? Aren't we paying you a large enough royalty?"

"You are paying me a good deal larger one than I deserve. I don't see
why you do it."

"Oh," with a wave of the hand, "that's all right. The publishing of
books is a pure philanthropy. We are in business for our health, and--"

"Shut up. You know as well as I do that the last two yarns of mine which
your house published have not done as well as the others."

I had caught him now. Anything remotely approaching a reflection upon
the business house of which he was the head was sufficient to stir
up Jim Campbell. That business, its methods and its success, were his
idols.

"I don't know any such thing," he protested, hotly. "We sold--"

"Hang the sale! You sold quite enough. It is an everlasting miracle
to me that you are able to sell a single copy. Why a self-respecting
person, possessed of any intelligence whatever, should wish to read the
stuff I write, to say nothing of paying money for the privilege, I can't
understand."

"You don't have to understand. No one expects an author to understand
anything. All you are expected to do is to write; we'll attend to the
rest of it. And as for sales--why, 'The Black Brig'--that was the last
one, wasn't it?--beat the 'Omelet' by eight thousand or more."

"The Omelet" was our pet name for "The Queen's Amulet," my first offence
in the literary line. It was a highly seasoned concoction of revolution
and adventure in a mythical kingdom where life was not dull, to say the
least. The humblest character in it was a viscount. Living in Bayport
had, naturally, made me familiar with the doings of viscounts.

"Eight thousand more than the last isn't so bad, is it?" demanded Jim
Campbell combatively.

"It isn't. It is astonishingly good. It is the books themselves that
are bad. The 'Omelet' was bad enough, but I wrote it more as a joke than
anything else. I didn't take it seriously at all. Every time I called
a duke by his Christian name I grinned. But nowadays I don't grin--I
swear. I hate the things, Jim. They're no good. And the reviewers are
beginning to tumble to the fact that they're no good, too. You saw the
press notices yourself. 'Another Thriller by the Indefatigable Knowles'
'Barnacles, Buccaneers and Blood, not to Mention Beauty and t