h she was several years his senior; and, for a
month or two after his departure from England, he had slept with her
photo under his pillow, and tried to imagine her warm farewell kisses on
his lips; and then, somehow, the photo had got mislaid, and the other
recollections had begun to lose their actuality, and when, a year later,
he had received the news of her engagement, he had written her a hearty,
and perfectly sincere, letter of congratulation. It would be distinctly
amusing to meet her under the new conditions, and see how much she was
disposed to remember.

CHAPTER VI

On Tuesday morning Jimmy opened the _Record_ as usual at page 4, and the
first thing that caught his eye was his own article. He glanced down it
quickly, with an unusual sense of exaltation: never before had anything
of his appeared in a great London daily; and the _Record's_ circulation
ran to a considerable fraction of a million. There was no one with him
to whom he could show it; but he was passing an hotel, the "Railway
Tavern," and he turned in at the door, to celebrate his luck, and read
his work through quietly.

The barmaid, who was polishing her spirit measures, looked at him
curiously. "You seem mighty pleased about something," she said at last,
perhaps a little resentfully, as though feeling that her own rather,
full-blown charms deserved more attention than the paper.

Jimmy glanced up with a smile. "There's an article of mine here," he
said, holding out the sheet.

The girl knit her brow and spelled out the heading. "My! Is that your
writing? What's it all about. Anything spicy?" But, though she was
regarding him with more interest than before, she made no attempt to
read his work.

Jimmy finished his drink and folded up the paper. Somehow, at the second
reading, it had not seemed so good. There were at least two clumsy
sentences, and the fool of a printer had chopped out half a dozen
commas. He could see now where he could have made several improvements,
and he had little doubt that Dodgson would see too, and, perhaps, reckon
him a careless workman. He had yet to learn how much, or how little, the
public recks of either grammar or punctuation, how it prefers
semi-truths tempered by split infinitives to facts stated in balanced
prose.

As he came out of the hotel, his mind was full of the career which
seemed to lie ahead of him, and he did not notice Laura Marlow walking
up the other side of the road; but Miss Marlow s