ithdraw the offer. It wasn't exactly an offer. He had
merely mentioned it as a possible opening, a suggestion in the last
resort. He pointed out to Prothero the dangers and the risks, among them
damage to his trade as a poet. Poets were too precious. There were, he
said, heaps of other men.

But Prothero had leaped at it; he had implored Brodrick not to put
another man in; and the more he leaped and implored the more Brodrick
tried to keep him off it.

But you couldn't keep him off. He was mad, apparently, with the sheer
lust of danger. He _would_ go. "If you do," Brodrick had said finally,
"you go at your own risk."

And he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. Brodrick,
in these days, found himself reiterating, "He _would_ go, he _would_
go." And all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his
death, because of Jane Holland.

He saw a great deal of Jane Holland in the weeks that followed
Prothero's departure.

They had reached the first month of autumn, and Jane was sitting out on
the lawn in Brodrick's garden. The slender, new-born body of Prothero's
Poems lay in her lap. Eddy Heron stretched himself at her feet. Winny
hung over her shoulder. Every now and then the child swept back her long
hair that brushed Jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see
what, as she phrased it, Mr. Prothero had done. Opposite them Mrs. Heron
and Gertrude Collett sat quietly sewing.

Eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about Jane as if she
wasn't there.

"I say, Mummy, don't you like her awfully?"

"Of course I like her," said Mrs. Heron, smiling at her son.

"Why do you like me?" said Jane, whose vision of Owen Prothero was again
obscured by Winny's hair.

"Why do we like anybody?" said Mrs. Heron, with her inassailable
reserve.

"You can't get out of it that way, Mum. You don't just go liking
anybody. You like jolly few. We're an awful family for not liking
people. Aren't we, Gee-Gee?"

"I didn't know it," said Miss Collett.

"Oh, but Gee-Gee's thinking of Uncle Hugh," said Winny.

Miss Collett's face stiffened. She _was_ thinking of him.

"Uncle Hugh? Why, he's worse than any of us. With
women--ladies--anyhow."

"Eddy, dear!" said Eddy's mother.

"Well, have you ever seen a lady Uncle Hugh could really stand--except
Miss Holland?"

Gertrude bent so low over her work that her face was hidden.

"I say! look at that kid. Can't you take your hair out of Miss