petent
to advise, prayed that she herself might always be modest enough to
wait at least until her advice was asked.

"I hope I have not discussed your opinion impolitely," she said. "Pray
excuse me if you think I have."

Mollified, he turned his attention once more to the littered bureau.

"You have a goodly pile of manuscript there," he remarked; "may I ask
what it is?"

"It is a little book into which I am putting all my ignorance," she
said.

"I hope you are not going to be diffident about letting me see it?" he
answered encouragingly. "I could certainly give you some useful
hints."

"You are too kind," she said; and he accepted the assertion without a
suspicion of sarcasm. She rose when she had spoken, drew the lid of
the bureau down over her papers, and locked it deliberately; but the
precaution rather flattered him than otherwise.

"You need not be afraid," he said. "I promise to be lenient. And if we
are as fast friends when the book appears as I trust we shall be, the
_Patriarch_ itself shall proclaim its merits; if not----"

"I suppose it will discover my faults," Beth put in demurely. "I
wonder, by the way," she added, "who told you you are so much cleverer
than I am?"

But fortunately Mrs. Kilroy came in and interrupted them before he had
had time to grasp the remark, for which Beth, from whom it had slipped
unawares, was devoutly thankful.

When he had gone, she sat and wondered if she had really understood
him aright with regard to the _Patriarch_. Certainly he had seemed to
threaten her, but it was hard to believe that he had sunk so low as to
be capable of criticising her work, not on its own merits, but with
regard to the terms he should be on with its author. She was too
upright herself, however, to think such dishonest meanness possible,
so she put the suspicion far from her, and tried to find some
charitable explanation of the several signs of paltriness she had
already detected, and to think of him as he had seemed to her in the
old days, when she had endowed him with all the qualities she herself
had brought into their acquaintance to make it pleasant and of good
effect.

Beth had taken to rambling about alone in the quiet streets and
squares for exercise; and as she returned a few days later from one of
these rambles, she encountered Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce coming out of
a florist's with a large bouquet of orchids in his hand.

"You see I do not forget you," he said, holding the