e, and I'm hanged if I could get him over. He
perorated, he posed like a shop-walker, you could see him hanging limp
like a broken puppet, and me behind with beads on my forehead uselessly
jerking the wires."

"Poor old boy!" said Kate sympathetically. "Oh, he'll do it beautifully
when once you're on the mountains. Now I look at you I can see you
really are run down. I've been planning how I will make you a
comfortable little study out of one of the bedrooms, and fix up your
writing-table under a window that has a view, and give you a verandah to
stalk up and down on when the fine frenzies seize you. But I don't want
you to come in for all the confusion of the first day."

"Nonsense," he said; "if you can stand it, I ought to be able to."

But that noble sentiment was uttered at night, after a comfortable
dinner at the club, and with the grateful appreciation of the sacrifice
this loyal sister was making in breaking all her engagements to come to
look after his welfare. It was before breakfast now, a time when the
sentiments are absolutely raw, and the noblest mind is capable of
resentment when not fortified with food. Hugh went out of the pantry and
settled himself gloomily upon a side verandah, uncertain which to
anathematize, the flies that had broken in upon his slumbers, or the
ones that evidently were studiously refraining from awakening his sister
and her handmaid.

But after a time the peace of the perfect morning soothed him, and he
put his feet up on the verandah rail, and fell to marvelling at his own
fame.

Five years ago he had been quite unknown--a struggling journalist
savagely treated by Fate. And for sheer need once of saner employment
for his leisure hours, he poured out some of the bitterness that a
severe attack of indigestion had deposited on the wholesome substratum
of his nature in perhaps as fierce a novel as had yet been written.

Five publishers rejected it with their customary regret; to the
stereotyped refusal of the sixth the reader added a few lines, saying he
had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of
nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh
firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note
accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know
that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six
shillings for