Charles and his family circle. Yet he had once been so proud of that
quaint old house with the Post Office in front.

CHAPTER XIII

THE PHILANDERERS

THE news was round the _Leader_ office like a flash of summer lightning.
The most secret transactions in the managerial room of a newspaper seem
to have this strange quality of immediately becoming the common
knowledge of the office-boy, without any one person being accusable of
blabbing. Not only so; but in a few hours there was no journalist in
Laysford, from the unattached penny-a-liner, who wrote paragraphs for
London trade papers, to the editors of the rival dailies, that did not
know who was the new editor of the _Leader_. Almost as soon as the news
had been confirmed, Edgar had penned a flowery eulogium and posted it to
that mighty organ of journalism, the _Fourth Estate_, which has
whimpered from youth to age that journalists will not buy it, although
they have never been averse from reading--or writing--its personal
puffs. Edgar showed herein either a better judgment of Henry's character
than one would have expected from him, or a little touch of innocence in
one so fain to be a man of the world. It is seldom that the subjects of
these gushing personal notices in the _Fourth Estate_ wait for others to
sing their praises; they can and do sound the loud timbrel themselves.
Shyness has no part in journalism, and even the bashful young junior,
who has been trying quack remedies for blushing, leaves his bashfulness
outside the door of the reporters' room after his first week on the
press.

But somehow, a thick streak of rustic simplicity remained in Henry's
character despite all the eye-opening and mental widening which had
resulted from his City life. If Edgar had not sent that paragraph Henry
never would, and if we could but peer into the inmost corner of Edgar's
heart we might find that the impulse behind the writing of the absurd
little puff about "a rising young journalist" was to stand well with the
man who had come to greatness--as greatness was esteemed in the
journalistic world of Laysford.

The news was conveyed in characteristic style to a quarter where it was
eagerly hoped for.

"It's happened just as I expected," Edgar announced, when he returned
home that evening. "Old Mac has got the shoot direct; no humming and
hawing, but 'Out you go!'"

"I suppose you mean he has been discharged