ered
cottage of my dreams," though also for other reasons unknown in
Yorkshire. His flat was abandoned before quarter-day, his effects
transplanted at considerable cost, and ever since Langholm had been a
bigoted countryman, who could not spend a couple of days in town without
making himself offensive on the subject at his club, where he was
nevertheless discreetly vague as to the exact locality of his rural
paradise. Even at the club, however, it was admitted that his work had
improved almost as much as his appearance; and he put it all down to the
roses in which he lived embowered for so many months of the year. Such
was their profusion that you could have filled a clothes-basket without
missing one, and Langholm never visited rich or poor without a little
offering out of his abundance.

"They may be coals to Newcastle," he would say to the Woodgates or the
Steels, "but none of your Tyneside collieries are a patch on mine."

Like most victims of the artistic temperament, the literary Langholm was
a creature of moods; but the very fact of a voluntary visit from him was
sufficient guarantee of the humor in which he came, and this afternoon
he was at his best. He had indeed been writing all day, and for many
days past, and was filled with the curious exhilaration which
accompanies an output too rapid and too continuous to permit a running
sense of the defects. He was a ship with a fair wind, which he valued
the more for the belts of calms and the adverse weather through which he
had passed and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was a happy
man, though one with no illusion as to the present product of his
teeming pen.

"It is nonsense," he said to Rachel, in answer to a question from that
new and sympathetic friend, "but it is not such nonsense as to seem
nothing else when one's in the act of perpetrating it, and what more can
one want? It had to be done by the tenth of August, and by Jove it will
be! A few weeks ago I didn't think it possible; but the summer has
thawed my ink."

"Are you sure it isn't Mrs. Steel?" asked one of the Venables girls,
who had also ridden over on their bicycles. "I heard you had a
tremendously literary conversation when you dined with us."

"We had, indeed!" said Langholm, with enthusiasm. "And Mrs. Steel gave
me one of the best ideas I ever had in my life; that's another reason
why I'm racing through this rubbish--to take it in hand."

It was Sybil to whom he was speaking, b