he really beautiful things are
done?"

"There's a really beautiful tea," said Miss Collett gaily, "in the
garden. There are scones and the kind of cake you like."

"You see," Brodrick said, "how she spoils me, how I lie on roses."

"You'd better come," said Miss Collett, "while the scones are still
hot."

"While," said Jane, "the roses are still fresh."

He held the door open for her, and on the threshold she turned to Miss
Collett who followed her.

"Are you sure," said she, "that he's the horrid Sybarite you think
him?"

"I am," said Brodrick, "whatever Miss Collett thinks me. If it pleases
her to think I'm a Sybarite I've got to _be_ a Sybarite."

"I see. And when the rose-leaves are crumpled you bring them to Miss
Collett, and she irons them out, and makes them all smooth again, so
that you don't know they're the same rose-leaves?"

"The rose-leaves never are crumpled."

"Except by some sudden, unconsidered movement of your own?"

"My movements," said Brodrick, "are never sudden and unconsidered."

"What? Never?"

Miss Collett looked a little surprised at this light-handed treatment of
the editor.

And Jane observed Brodrick with a new interest as they sat there in the
garden and Miss Collett poured out tea. "Mr. Brodrick," she said to
herself, "is going to marry Miss Collett, though he doesn't know it."

By the end of the afternoon it seemed to her an inevitable consummation,
the marriage of Mr. Brodrick and Miss Collett. She could almost see it
working, the predestined attraction of the eternally compatible, the
incomparably fit. And when Brodrick left off taking any notice of Miss
Collett, and finally lured Jane away into the library on the flimsiest
pretence, she wondered what game he was up to. Perhaps in his innocence
he was blind to Miss Collett's adoration. He was not sure of Miss
Collett. He was trying to draw her.

Jane, intensely interested, advanced from theory to theory of Brodrick
and Miss Collett while Brodrick removed himself to the writing-table,
and turned on her a mysterious back.

"I want to show you something," he said.

She went to him. In the bared centre of the writing-table he had placed
a great pile of manuscript. He drew out his chair for her, so that she
could sit down and look well at the wonder.

Her heart leaped to the handwriting and to George Tanqueray's name on
the title-page.

"You've seen it?" he said.

"No. Mr. Tanqueray never shows his work."

From