d the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into
the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object--the
large red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and
busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. The
temptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic
band that kept it discreetly closed.

"Private. Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on the
cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in
one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's preparatory school.

"Black is the raven, black is the rook,
But blacker the thief who steals this book!"

It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He
opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been
struck.

Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed.
He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the
palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself.
His weaknesses, his absurdities--no one knew them better than he did.
Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware
of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear
to other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever
spoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be
quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk
of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege
reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an image
of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.

On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to
the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severest
critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.

The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature
of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a
dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend:
"Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified,
Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious
Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The
expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered
by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of
studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of