visitors he
had had--except the postman, and the boy from the grocer--had
pertinaciously urged that the Mirador was incomplete without these
objects.

The young man looked horrified for an instant, but being a journalist
and used to rude shocks, he was able hastily to marshal his features
and bring them stiffly to attention. He had already learned that the
Mirador's new owner was "peculiar," a sort of hermit whom nobody called
on, because he did his own work, wore shabby clothes, and made no
pretense of having social eminence. Indeed, it had never occurred to
any one (until the idea jumped into the reporter's brilliant brain)
that a person who could buy and inhabit that half ruined "doll's house"
could be of importance in the outside world. The journalist it was who,
happening to meet the postman near the Drake place that morning, saw a
huge envelope addressed to "John Sanbourne." He flashed out an eager
question: "Is there a John Sanbourne living near here?" He was
answered: "Yes, a fellow by that name's bought the Mirador"; quickly
elicited a few further details, and, abandoning another project,
arrived when the postman was out of the way, at the Mirador gate. It
was a blow--severe if not fatal--to romance to find John Sanbourne
splashed with whitewash and looking as a self-respecting mason would be
ashamed to look. But perhaps he was a socialist. That would at least
make an interesting paragraph.

"Are you _the_ John Sanbourne, the man who wrote 'The War Wedding'?"
the visitor persisted.

Denin was surprised and disconcerted. "Why do you ask?" he sharply
answered one question with another; then added, still more sharply,
"And who are you?"

"My name's Reid. I work for a San Francisco paper, and I'm
correspondent for one in New York. If you wrote the book that's made
such a wonderful boom, my papers want to get a story about you."

"Thank you. That's very kind of you and of them," said Denin coolly.
"But I haven't a 'story' worth any newspaper's getting. I'm sorry you
should give yourself trouble in vain. Yet so it must be."

"When I say 'a story,' I mean an article--an interview," Reid explained
to the amateur intelligence. "I think," he went on, beginning to find
possibilities in the hermit and his surroundings (voice with charm in
it: fine eyes: striking height: peculiar fad for solitude, etc.)--"I
think I see my way to something pretty good."

"I'm afraid," Denin insisted, speaking with great civility, be