lace where one can stay all one's life. I am looking at the papers
every day to see if your book is out. I do wish you the best of success
with it, Jimmy," and then, without any conventional phrase before it,
came the simple signature, "Lalage."

Jimmy did not touch his breakfast that morning. Instead, he sat very
still, staring out of the window, trying to picture Lalage--who had once
been his Lalage--serving behind the counter in a stuffy little draper's
shop. "The sort of place where you can stay all your life." Would she,
could she, stand the idea of such a future? Would she go on alone
always, whilst he would be getting on in the world, climbing the ladder
to such fame as novelists get in these days of many novels, getting back
into his own world, and possibly----?

There was a knock at the front door, and as if in confirmation of his
thought, he found the Grimmer chauffeur standing on the step.

"Note for you, sir," he said.

Jimmy tore it open. "Vera and I are going for a run round the country,"
Ethel wrote. "Will you come with us?"

Jimmy turned round to the hat rack and took down his cap and overcoat.

"Have you brought the car down for me?" he asked.

CHAPTER XXV

Mr. Grimmer looked up with a grin. "I don't know what the old joker will
say if you bring your scheme to a head," he remarked.

Ethel, who was standing in front of the fireplace, smoking daintily,
tried hard to look shocked.

"My dear Billy," she drawled. "That is hardly the way to speak of an
Honorary Canon who expects to become a bishop, if his father-in-law
lives long enough to get into another Cabinet. Then, for one thing,
Jimmy won't propose for some time yet, not until Vera has been away and
come back again; and when they are engaged what can the old joker, as
you call him, do to me?"

"He might preach about you," her husband suggested.

Ethel shrugged her shoulders. "I shouldn't be there to hear him; it
would make May Marlow blush and send that hateful Ida Fenton white with
passion. By the way, did I tell you that Ida had taken a house in town?
They think she's going to be married again, to that horrid, clean-shaven
man with the damp hands, who's always collecting for some mission or
other. You must know him, Billy. Surely you do; we used to call him the
Additional Curate. Well, to go back to Jimmy. He wouldn't give Vera up,
and her money is under her own control."

"He had to give you up," Grimmer said.

His wife laug