nd he had no time.

Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid.
In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had
grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the
old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging
deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to
most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which
bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the
frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent
evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later
prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the
other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of
growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and
becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly,
human.

When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter
every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the
last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery
Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping
only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More
than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open
new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve
of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store
of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.

"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he
exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her
in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child
in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other
people would think and do under conditions about which you can't
possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"

"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was
her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode
in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode
forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it
comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at
you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in
love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."

"That's true; I can s