monthly
magazine--for the work of the great authors only. That was his,
Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through.
Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the
advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He
could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the
back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave
the popular magazines behind him.

"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.

"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"

"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a
gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."

"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.

"And he wants--he told me--to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr.
Tanqueray. And he's sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You'll
all be in it. It's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all
days."

In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be
seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.

A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It
was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring
noises in it.

"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."

And he went out.

He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr.
Hugh Brodrick.

Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with
his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of
Tanqueray, of Brodrick.

Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso
inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but
regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who
grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull
sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from
the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes.
They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze,
which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his
interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her
in her corner.

This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky,
as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of
introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate.
It was wonderful how in