alism. If he had to be "chatty
"--well, he _was_ chatty. Now and then he made a hit that--it was stupid
of me--brought the blood to my face. I hated him to be so personal; but
still, if it would make his fortune--! It wouldn't of course directly,
but the book would, practically and in the sense to which our pure ideas
of fortune were confined; and these things were all for the book.
The daily balm meanwhile was in what one knew of the book--there were
exquisite things to know; in the quiet monthly cheques from Blackport
and in the deeper rose of Maud's little preparations, which were as
dainty, on their tiny scale, as if she had been a humming-bird building
a nest. When at the end of three months her betrothed had fairly settled
down to his correspondence--in which Mrs. Highmore was the only person,
so far as we could discover, disappointed, even she moreover being in
this particular tortuous and possibly jealous; when the situation
had assumed such a comfortable shape it was quite time to prepare.
I published at that moment my first volume, mere faded ink to-day, a
little collection of literary impressions, odds and ends of criticism
contributed to a journal less remunerative but also less chatty than the
_Beacon_, small ironies and ecstasies, great phrases and mistakes;
and the very week it came out poor Limbert devoted half of one of his
letters to it, with the happy sense this time of gratifying both himself
and me as well as the Blackport breakfast-tables. I remember his saying
it wasn't literature, the stuff, superficial stuff, he had to write
about me; but what did that matter if it came back, as we knew, to
the making for literature in the roundabout way? I sold the thing, I
remember, for ten pounds, and with the money I bought in Vigo Street
a quaint piece of old silver for Maud Stannace, which I carried to her
with my own hand as a wedding-gift. In her mother's small drawing-room,
a faded bower of photography fenced in and bedimmed by folding screens
out of which sallow persons of fashion with dashing signatures looked at
you from retouched eyes and little windows of plush, I was left to
wait long enough to feel in the air of the house a hushed vibration of
disaster. When our young lady came in she was very pale and her eyes too
had been retouched.

"Something horrid has happened," I immediately said; and having really
all along but half believed in her mother's meagre permission I risked
with an unguarded gro