ay."

Verrian replied, thoughtfully, "She didn't strike me as a country
person--at least, in her first letter."

"Then you still think she didn't write both?"

"If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality she had invented."

"Girls are very strange," his mother sighed. "They like excitement,
adventure. It's very dull in those little places. I shouldn't wish you
to think any harm of the poor thing."

"Poor thing? Why this magnanimous compassion, mother?"

"Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used
almost to die of hunger for something to happen. Can you remember just
what you said in your letter?"

Verrian laughed. "NO, I can't. But I don't believe I said half enough.
You're nervous, mother."

"Yes, I am. But don't you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how
I should hate to have anybody's unhappiness mixed up with this happiness
of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not
tainted with the pain of any human creature."

Verrian answered with light cynicism: "It will be tainted with the pain
of the fellows who don't like me, or who haven't succeeded, and they'll
take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean
that merry maiden up country, she's probably thinking, if she thinks
about it at all, that she's the luckiest girl in the United States to
have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun
with her in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing to grieve
for but her own break."

"No, and you did just as you should have done; and I am glad you don't
feel bitterly about it. You don't, do you?"

"Not the least."

His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay smiling. "Well,
that's good. After all, it's you I cared for. Now I can say good-night."
But she lingered to tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the
mother habit. "I wish you may never do anything that you will be sorry
for."

"Well, I won't--if it's a good action."

They laughed together, and she left the room, still looking back to see
if there was anything more she could do for him, while he lay smiling,
intelligently for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she was
doing.

VII.

Even in the time which was then coming and which now is, when successful
authors are almost as many as millionaires, Verrian's book brought him
a pretty celebrity; and this celebrity was in a way specific. It
related to the