ay after
New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she
would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not
bring herself to write.

"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He
must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?"

And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please
me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane
sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after.

In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four.
Tanqueray."

Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in
her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of
his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his
old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug,
of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart
were still.

"What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out."

"I am worn out."

"With Book, Jinny?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting
people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a
spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there.
And there."

His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were
stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts.
Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every
available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on
celebrity.

Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene.

"Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny--"one little
line--I've got to send answers to all that."

"You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of
answering?"

"If it could only end in dreaming."

He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is
it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you
go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by
yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like."

"George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"

"My dear Jinny, I've tried my level best to save you. But you wouldn't
_be_ saved."

"Ah," said she, "you don't know how I've hated it."

"Haven't you liked any of it."

"No," she said slowly. "Not any of it."

"The praise, Jinn