eager outpouring of a human soul, mighty, passionate, and
wistful. He had kept his eyes on her slim bust and tight-girded waist
that sprung suddenly neat and smooth out of the curving skirt-folds, and
it had not occurred to him to exclaim even in his own heart: "With your
girlishness and your ferocity, your intimidating seriousness and your
delicious absurdity, I would give a week's wages just to take hold of
you and shake you!" No! The dolt had seen absolutely naught but a
conscientious female beginner learning the duties of the post which he
himself had baptized as that of 'editorial secretary.'

II

Hilda was no longer in a nameless trouble. She no longer wanted she knew
not what. She knew beyond all questioning that she had found that which
she had wanted. For nearly a year she had had lessons in phonography
from Miss Dayson's nephew, often as a member of a varying night-class,
and sometimes alone during the day. She could not write shorthand as
well as Mr. Dayson, and she never would, for Mr. Dayson had the
shorthand soul; but, as the result of sustained and terrific effort, she
could write it pretty well. She had grappled with Isaac Pitman as with
Apollyon and had not been worsted. She could scarcely believe that in
class she had taken down at the rate of ninety words a minute Mr.
Dayson's purposely difficult political speechifyings (which always
contained the phrase 'capital punishment,' because 'capital punishment'
was a famous grammalogue); but it was so, Mr. Dayson's watch proved it.

About half-way through the period of study, she had learnt from Mr.
Cannon, on one of his rare visits to her mother's, something about his
long-matured scheme for a new local paper. She had at once divined that
he meant to offer her some kind of a situation in the enterprise, and
she was right. Gratitude filled her. Mrs. Lessways, being one of your
happy-go-lucky, broad-minded women, with an experimental disposition--a
disposition to let things alone and see how they will turn out--had made
little objection, though she was not encouraging.

Instantly the newspaper had become the chief article of Hilda's faith.
She accepted the idea of it as a nun accepts the sacred wafer, in
ecstasy. Yet she knew little about it. She was aware that Mr. Cannon
meant to establish it first as a weekly, and then, when it had grown, to
transform it into a daily and wage war with that powerful monopolist,
_The Staffordshire Signal_, which from it