The Accident of War

I

THEY had come upon it in the evening— a long, low house, too beautiful for words. Roses blew on its walls, the windows were leaded and oddly shaped, a stream ran through the garden. Mary had put her face to one window and John was peering through another. They shouted their discoveries, breathless, and like two children caught up by a game.

‘A chimney-corner with inglenooks and iron dogs,’ shouted Mary, ‘and beams all over the ceiling.’

‘Mine’s got beams,’ answered John, ‘ and paneling, and a carved fireplace — ‘Here’s the best room,’ shouted Mary, ‘ with a long window so that you can step out, and real old stenciled wall-paper; and some one’s carved his name on a brick—“Nicolas, 1628.”’ She spelled it aloud for him and added the date.

‘There’s a ladder in the kitchen,’ he repaid her; ‘goes up into a bedroom, I suspect; and a pump, and a red brick floor, and great hooks to hang hams on — I suppose it’s hams.’

Thus they circled the house, proclaiming its glories, with no one to listen except the birds and the tinkling stream. It stood all silent, it made no answer, secure in its beauty, its age, and its stored memories. It seemed to them even a little ghostly as the shadows disappeared and they two were alone with it and the green, sheepdotted meadows.

They passed out at the low white gate, they took the path uphill, they reached a second gate, and so came to a lane that gave on the road and a vague village. Their fly was waiting for them at the inn.

‘It’s ours,’ said Mary. She had said so once before.

‘I’ll buy it,’ answered John.

Next day, however, they discovered that you could n’t ‘buy it’ without taking over the rest of the estate, which ran to some six-thousand-odd acres and was not actually in the market. The agent smiled as he explained the situation. But Horner’s was to let, he said.

He mentioned the rental. John and Mary agreed that it was ridiculous.

Horner’s, they discovered, was what is known in England as an ‘odd farmhouse.’ Every farm had its dwellinghouse that went with the land, and if a farmer held more than a single farm, he would also hold a superfluity of houses. That was why Horner’s was to let. Mr. Harrowby and his family preferred the other house — a modern one. That same afternoon John and Mary called on Mr. Harrowby.

He was expecting them, for John had been lavish with wires.

‘ Of course it’s only a farmhouse, and a very old one at that,’ he said tentatively. He could n’t quite understand this couple — they looked like gentlefolk. He had expected a man with an interest in chickens, — at Horner’s, of course, you might keep chickens, — or a retired couple who would eke out a tiny income by filling the house with summer boarders. But these two — they were something beyond him.

‘Of course, if you keep a dog, it must n’t worry my sheep in the lambing season,’ he was saying. ‘You understand that?’

They understood everything. They wanted now to see the inside of Horner’s, and each had vowed to the other not to go into audible raptures for fear the man would put the rent up; and, for the same reason, they had agreed to conceal the fact that they were Americans.

Horner’s, inside, was all and more than it had promised. Such dear rooms, no two alike! And none were square or rigid as in a modern house, and every hall and every lobby and every passage had its character. Mr. Harrowby bumped his head coming down the single flight of stairs; but then, he was very tall and had not looked out. They would look out.

There was no bath or bathroom, but one could be made; the water came here, boring under the meadow.

Mr. Harrowby apologized for countless drawbacks. He did n’t think Horner’s would suit them.

‘Perhaps not,’ they answered. It was the moment to knock a pound or two off that ridiculous rental; yet neither of them had the nerve, they confessed afterwards.

‘If you were keeping chickens or took in boarders,’ said Mr. Harrowby, ‘ there’s an acre of land round the house and I could let you have part of the meadow.’

They were in the coach-house now, and looking over the three-stall stabling. John had thought out a place for the bathroom, and so had Mary. Luckily it was the same place.

‘All right,’ said John suddenly, ‘I’ll take it. If it’s a failure it’s a failure, and not much harm done.’

Mr. Harrowby seemed relieved.

‘I don’t mind papering the good rooms,’ he said.

Mary could see his idea of papering; and he was n’t going to touch that old stenciling of white and lavender!

‘Of course, we choose,’ she snapped.

‘Certainly,’ he assented guardedly, ‘if it’s not too expensive.’

So they settled it, and left him wondering. The agent would do the rest and John’s bank was a reference.

Mr. Harrowby saw them to their fly; and next they were alone with plans that included furnishing, and heaps of pots and china and candlesticks — it would take them months and months.

‘Not a word — not a word did I say,’ began Mary, ‘about those old brass finger-plates — on every door they were — they want rubbing up.’

‘And I cursed the heavenly closets that are going to save us buying wardrobes. Did you see the hooks and shelves in them?’

‘And the dresser in the kitchen — all oak, and lovely and neglected?’

‘And the paneling and the carving in the room we’re going to quarrel over?’

‘And did you mark my English accent?’

‘It was spotty,’ answered John.

‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘I kept on forgetting.’

And that is how John and Mary Callendar came to take Horner’s.

II

John was an only son and did no work worth mentioning. His father, he would explain, had worked enough for both. It was true, literally and figuratively. There was no special reason why John should continue to waste a lifetime in a New York office, and so, Mary aiding and abetting, they had come abroad. This absence was their honeymoon, and already, when they took Horner’s, it had lasted several years. They had lived in Paris, in Greece, in Italy, and they had spent the bygone spring in London. The train from Dover had given them a glimpse of England. ‘Let’s settle here for a while,’ John had said, looking out of the carriage window; and Mary had agreed. Old houses grew in that parklike country, and they had determined to fasten on one of these. Not a big one, that would own them, but a small, manageable place like Horner’s. Its dozen rooms would be more than they wanted, and here, for a few years, they would make a home — their very own and not some one else’s, a real place into which they fitted. To-day, installed, they felt like one of those collectors whose choicest treasure was bought for half-a-crown. The house itself was their bargain, though at auction sales and on countless expeditions there had been others.

They said nothing to Mr. Harrowby, the unconscious victim, but privately they crowed over it. They grew into Horner’s; little by little they took possession; and, as they had foreseen, its furnishing and arranging was the occupation of a year.

Yet no one else seemed to love it. Instead of a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, your ordinary man would sooner live with a Peter Smith. Old houses, too, they learned, are an acquired taste and one that comes only with a little knowledge. The tradespeople who called had a dubious air, a polite contemptuousness; and the two servants, a married bumpkin couple, lamented the inaccessibility of the house and its lack of those tawdry elements which they approved — florid wall-papers, florid furniture, whitewashed ceilings. In England, outside the urban radii, the past and all its fine achievement had been forgotten, and the rustic mind longed for the obvious that sprawled, all red-brick and window-glass, a sight for gapers looking through a painted railing.

John and Mary got a second married couple, this time from London. These loved the house.

And, incidentally, they had discovered that Horner’s placed them. Socially, it should be understood. Their neighbors called,— the vicar first, a shrewd, foreseeing man who declared them harmless and eligible, assessed their income at a glance, and the contributions that might be levied thereon without a strain. Next came the ‘church-workers,’ with subscription lists, desiccated women for whom love was not. The previous tenant of Horner’s had always given five shillings, they said. And after these streamed some very minor gentry, blandly condescending. The vicar had reported and John and Mary were given their due place, no more, no less. They learned the order of that rustic hierarchy, where every one lived to the utmost limit of his income and a bit over. So might you know just who and what they were. The ladies of captains, majors, and colonels well retired, drove up to the front gate and left their cards; and one day came the pseudosquire and his lady, the ancient legendary squires being broken and dispersed. This fellow, the romantic son of a London bill-broker deceased, acted the part with a cheery realism.

And over all that landscape brooded the Estate, whose marquis owned everything and everybody — the village, the farms, the houses, big and little. The man was absent and an agent ruled for him. His palace and his park — you could see them from Horner’s — were let to a financier whom no one knew, a kind of mammoth who occasionally escaped the London jungles: he brought his own friends, he lived his own life, he was invisible.

III

The postman had left three letters for Mary. The first two did not matter, but the third was all important. It was from Frances Cowley and bulging with the news.

There were happenings in New York, happenings in Philadelphia, happenings in Boston, and a series of the liveliest personalities, about relatives and common friends and interesting new people. There was the young man to whom Mattie Harper had become engaged, and the German professor who had stayed with the Denholms, and the Louisville girl Chris Harrison was so mad about. Frances was ever a faithful correspondent, and it seemed that Mary could hold her own; for on the last page of all stood a definite announcement; Mary digested it and passed it across to John.

‘You won’t mind, dear,’ it said. ‘Mr. Gale, the publisher, was dining with us the other evening, and after dinner I read your last letter aloud — it had just come in. They are always so delightful, those descriptions of your life over there, of your neighbors, the house and garden, and the village, and this last letter was positively brilliant. Mr. Gale, Aunt Susan, mother, Mr. Heron and I were there. Nobody else. Naturally, I skipped all the really personal bits; but the rest — they got it all. When I had done, Mr. Gale said, “Have you any more like it?” Of course, I’ve a whole deskful. I fetched one or two others and read them. Mr. Gale grew quite serious. “I’m going to make a book of these,” he said, ‘Elizabeth and her English Garden — something of that sort.’ We were all delighted with the idea, and so will you be. The book is coming out in the new year, before the rush. Mr. Gale will attend to everything, provided it has my approval. He is sending you a contract as soon as ever he gets ready. Have I been rash? Tell me, dear, and don’t spare me.’

‘ That’s just like Frances,’ said Mary.

‘It’ll be rather a lark,’ said John. He knew those letters — they were among the most amusing things that ever occurred at Horner’s. ’If no one here sees them,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘there’ll be no harm done.’

‘Of course,’ said Mary, ‘when they get published, it won’t be under any name. And then it’s only in America. No one here knows anything about America; they’d never heard of it nor met one until we came.’

The contract arrived the week after, and Mary was to get fifteen cents on every copy sold. She signed it blindly. ‘I’ll spend the money, if there is any, on the garden,’ she said. She had visions of really expensive bulbs, which so far she had denied herself, and of Alpine plants for her rockery. Not knowing how long they were going to stay at Horner’s, she had hitherto restricted such extravagances. Now, if her letters about the place brought in money, the things would have paid for themselves.

She corrected her proof-sheets, which came promptly, and she was very careful to see that every name was a long way from the right name, and to mix up all the houses so that no one would ever guess that the Hall stood for the Grange or the Gables for Woodlands. The book, of course, might leak out,— you could never tell, — and she wished to hurt nobody’s feelings, although some of them had not spared hers. The women were rather spiteful, she discovered, seeing them over again and in the lump.

‘I guess that’s because we’re different,’ John commented. ‘We don’t conform; we laugh and cry in the wrong places.’

In December following, Mr. Gale, the publisher, startled John and Mary with a second announcement.

‘You will be glad to hear,’ he wrote enthusiastically, ‘that your book will appear simultaneously in England and in America. I have succeeded in placing it with one of the very biggest London houses. It is quite a triumph for a first book. . . .’

There would be more money from this source, he ended; and, when John and Mary examined the contract, they found that he was acting entirely and scrupulously within his rights.

‘All the names have been changed,’ cried Mary. ‘There’s nothing by which they can identify the author or the place or anything.’

‘Anyway, they never read a book,’ said John.

‘No, they’re hopeless,’ answered Mary. She had seldom met with an illiteracy such as prevailed about this countryside. It was appalling; it was ghastly; she had often wondered who the English were who did things. They were none of them here. They must have gone away to the cities or overseas.

The book came out in the first week of February. It was bound in a bright and skyey blue, and on the cover in pure gold stood: ‘Two in England.’ Nothing more. This title was the handiwork of Mr. Gale.

IV

Till Easter it remained their secret, — the book, the whole excitement of paragraphs, cuttings, and reviews. The London publishers sent on these details, and Mr. Gale followed with a parallel assemblage, hardly so polite. It was the despised English who understood and who applauded Mary Callendar. The critics in the towns, it seemed, saw eye to eye with her. They knew this ground, had probably escaped its littlenesses. The beauty of it they touched freshly, just as she.

The Americans, she fancied, had no real interest in a life remote from theirs and possibly antagonistic to it. They seemed to say that John and Mary had abandoned a progressive country for something shadowy and unreal. May be it was true, but that had hardly been her object; and, after all, it was Mr. Gale’s fault. She had n’t dreamed of publication. Privately she received letters that were far more appreciative. A quiet public seemed to like her, though the press notices took her to task.

‘It’s their duty,’ said John, to whom the book was dedicated. ‘Some day we’ll go back and be truly useful citizens.’ He drew her to him as he spoke, and she knew his meaning. Their children, when they came, would be good Americans, though, for the nonce, the parents might be straying.

It was not till after Easter that the book came to Elmsford — to Elmsford village, to Elmsford town, to all that countryside which it illuminated.

There was an intelligent greengrocer in Elmsford and he began it; a great reader he was and shrewd in observation. He passed the news along, and his many recognitions of the local notables. And now the book sailed gayly down the High Street and the rumor of it spread in tradesmen’s carts that called for orders. Next it reached the servants’ quarters — by what processes is unrecorded; and thence it was but a step to higher ground.

Mary had hardly reckoned on the greengrocer, or on this literate middle rank outside her social purview. She discovered subsequently that behind these cautious shop-fronts lay half the brains of England and most of its ambitions. At present, however, she was occupied with polite evasions.

There were the vicar and the vicar’s wife, two of her pet characters. They called expressly, because they wanted to know. Really, there could be no doubt, in spite of the change of names, for in three of the letters stood glaring records of things that had actually happened. Mary had seen only the humor of them at the time; to-day they wore the face of Tragedy.

She had, for instance, given a full and particular account of the vicar’s difference with the strong-minded church-worker; a truly feline and ferocious argument, which, though conducted in public and with all regard for the proprieties, had startled three committees and overflowed into the columns of the parish magazine. The lady had triumphed; the vicar had retired. And then there was the story of how the vicar’s wife had appropriated the six pots of plum-jam that were left over from the bazaar, brazenly annexed them, and served them out at tea; and here too were her simply inhuman views on servant girls and their young men, and a report of John’s altruistic debate with the vicar on the same burning topic.

When this couple had gone, politely yet firmly evaded, John went up to the village on an errand that involved a word with Mr. Hicks, the village carpenter.

He found Mr. Hicks possessed of the book and lending it out at twopence a time to daily readers. I hope you’re making as much money out of it as I am,’ said Mr. Hicks.

Guiltily John returned, yet inwardly guffawing. That evening he and Mary held the volume in review. They had thought that they had been careful, but their nationality was specified, the district was indicated, and in one place Mary had written John, meaning her husband, who was ordinarily allowed the bare initial. They found four more slips of a like nature, The retired civil servant who boasted so of his pedigree and lived at the Hermitage was actually given intact if one omitted his surname; and so were most of the minor characters, — shepherds and ploughmen, gardeners and washerwomen, and boys taken on for odd jobs from the village. There could be no mistaking them. They realized at last that in that limited world every individual stood out clear and characteristic, though possibly the beauty and the continuity of that still life were hardly visible to those who made it.

‘We’re in for it,’ said Mary; ‘and I can’t stop it.’

Stop it, indeed! Why, only yesterday the London publisher had written to congratulate his author on a fourth impression. All over England Mary was being read, but here she had more than the topicality of the local newspaper.

V

There were hostile glances for John and Mary, or else a pained silence that preceded the cut direct. Never had their lives been so peaceful; the perfunctory calls and callers had vanished, leaving them free to make their garden, now approaching radiance, and John was mastering the rudiments of cricket, a game that first puzzled and then engrossed.

In the village itself and among the people their going and coming evoked sympathetic grins. ‘Them’s the two wot did it,’Mary might have heard; and from John, who moved more freely and with less caution, she gathered that she had become the spokesman of a whole feudality. In countless ways she learned that she had but said aloud what these others whispered, and that it was only the ‘quality,’ whose conventions she had defied or challenged, who bore her an undying grudge. She had not thought of them at all, save as objects in a landscape; and this made her crime the more offensive, and possibly the truer and heartier to the taste.

‘If they only had a sense of humor,’groaned John.

‘But they have n’t,’answered Mary; ‘and did n’t I say it, and resay it, and say it all over again?’

In the lull that followed, the situation gained a clearer outline. The newcomers were to be outcast and sent to Coventry till further orders. So John read it, and found it not unnatural.

‘We’ve sinned against the immemorial instincts of the herd,’he said.

And then one day, taking the big chestnut out for a gallop across the downs, he ran into Topham-Brooke, late of the Scarlet Lancers, riding a bright roan with a speaking head.

The two gentlemen had a huntingfield acquaintance.

‘Halloa, young feller, I hear you’ve done it!’ shouted the major, almost before there had been a recognition.

‘Done what?’ asked John, genuinely at a loss.

‘That book of Mrs. Callendar’s,’pursued the major. ‘ My wife and I — we sat up half the night and roared over it. So jolly well written, too — but why were n’t you more careful?’

‘ We were as careful as we knew how.’

‘But you did n’t know enough, eh, Callendar?’

‘Seems not,’ said John. ‘Really, we did n’t mean to hurt anybody.’

Next they fell to discussing the horse, — a passion they held in common, — too technically for further report.

‘You’ll be out again in September, in spite of the book,’laughed the major. ‘You’re keeping two hunters?’

‘Three,’ corrected John.

‘Lucky devil! I can’t afford more than one — Oh, yes, I borrow.’

‘Borrow one of mine,’ said John, ‘if you’re ever in need.’

‘Thanks awfully,’ said the major; and then he laughed again. ‘I say,’ he began; and for a moment he hesitated.

‘What do you say?’ asked John.

‘Well, if Mrs. Callendar’ll go round on her hands and knees and say she’s sorry, and hand the profits over to the vicar’s coal club and Mrs. Tremlett’s Christmas tree or something, and stop that book of hers and abolish it altogether, there’ll be no more said and you’ll be asked to tea again and all forgiven. So my wife tells me. She heard ’em say so. Those are the terms. They seemed to think it likely. Can’t say I agreed. Rum lot up at Elmsford — too many retired noodles. Must n’t judge England quite by that sample. You know there are places in America — in the South and East — damned dull. Oh, I’ve been there — buying remounts during the Boer War — all the men gone, only old women.’

‘ I wish you ’d move and live at Elmsford,’said John, laughing.

‘Roydon’s bad enough, but I farm my little place — gives me something to think about besides art and literature. I must be going — Bye-bye, Callendar. Er — your lady won’t mind if we come in some day for a cup of tea?’ And away he went, bronzed, breezy, and riding an excellent seat.

John watched him.

‘Those are the terms,’he reflected. ‘Mary down on her hands and knees and in a white sheet!’

VI

Though the major might hardly be described as an emissary, it was certain that the two offenders were to be given a chance. Not much of a chance, as such things went, but, surely, as much of a one as they deserved. The respite ended with the June quarter-day, when there arrived Mr. Dan Harrowby from whom they had taken Horner’s. John met him in the garden, and they had their chat striding to and fro across the lawn.

Mr. Harrowby was manifestly uneasy. He apologized and cleared the way before he began. But at last he got started. It was not his fault, it was the estate, — more especially the agent of the estate, — who had been quite firm; and there was also a petition, a kind of round-robin, got up by the local notables. In brief, he had received orders to find another and less versatile tenant.

For a moment John wondered whether this could be true, or whether it were not a case of Mr. Harrowby’s ultimate realization that he had almost presented them with Horner’s. Mary had said so in the book.

‘If it’s a matter of money,’ he answered, ‘we might come to terms.’

But no, it was not a matter of money. And next John remembered that there was a passage, something about insanitary cottages, which the estate might take to itself.

‘So that’s it!’ said John. ‘I get a half-year’s notice, don’t I?’

‘ If you like to give it me — I thought you might like to be the one. That’s why I came as soon as I was sure. Book or no book, I don’t hold with this,’ concluded Mr. Harrowby.

It was only after he had gone and was well across the meadow that John and Mary quite realized what his visit had meant.

‘They can’t make us apologize and so they want to kick us out,’ said John.

‘We’ll go when we get ready.’

‘ And not a day before.’

John’s face was drawn, determined. It was not for nothing that he was the son of old Mike Callendar, who had broken railroads in America and had fought with wilder, vaster, and more ominous foes than an absentee marquis and his estate.

VII

The major had called and brought his lady. ‘We’ve tried to pacify ’em,’ he announced, ‘but they’re out for blood. Olive’s tackled them and I’ve tackled them.’

‘Ridiculous!’ cried Olive Brooke.

John listened, feeling that he and Mary had done more. He was newly returned from London; and, ‘I’m game,’ Mary had told him as he left, ‘even if it means an income small enough to stay on here and all our savings thrown out of the window.’

‘It’ll mean exchanging six per cent for three and a lock-up till we’ve shown these people.’

‘ I think we’ll turn a few of them out, starting with the agent; and I’ll take over all the cottages and put them in good repair.’

‘And then they’ll say you’re gifted but eccentric—“such a charming woman, but totally and utterly mad!”’

‘You think they’ll forgive us?’

‘Lord, they’d forgive us murder if we owned the Estate!’

By now it will be clear that certain retaliatory measures were being devised at Horner’s. John, ‘keeping himself to himself,’ had early discovered that the marquis might be induced to sell; that this young man, indeed, stood in a perpetual want of ready money, and that, given a sufficient temptation, he, or, rather, his advisers, would be glad to part with the estate. Originally John had feared that the marquis, like so many of his peers, might possess only a life interest.

Thus far had our two Americans arrived toward the close of that July, little dreaming that their plans, like so many myriads of others, depended, not on holdings and investments, but on the War Lords of this earth.

It came home to them on the Sunday — the second of August, 1914, to be precise. They were playing a round of croquet, taking good care to avoid the stream, when Major TophamBrooke motored up post-haste and leaped out of his car.

‘What’s all this war-talk, major?’ John received him.

‘Do tell us about it,’ added Mary.

‘I’m afraid it is n’t talk,’ he answered gravely. ‘Those two hunters of yours — I’ve come to buy them.

‘I’ve three,’ said John, incredulous, but with an involuntary tremor.

‘We’ll call ’em two,’ said Brooke.

Then only did John and Mary realize that it might come; that it was moving like a storm from far-off valleys.

There was the lawn, decked out for tea with linen and silver; the peace of God was hallowing meadow and blue sky; the uncut corn was standing, ruddy-golden, on the hillside; and all this horror —

‘Are you serious?’ asked John.

‘ Government orders — here’s my cheque-book,’ answered the major. ‘I’m sorry. I go back to the old regiment as soon as I’m through here.’ He hesitated. He met Mary’s eye, and she met his. ‘Look after Olive a bit,’ he added, ‘if you can spare the time. She’s got to run the place — the two youngsters’ll be back from school. I’ve got a girl and a boy, you know —’

Poor Mary was close to tears. She had never realized that living in Europe might mean this; and she liked the Brookes — and then, a girl and a boy —

‘We’ll do anything, John,’ she said, ‘anything for these people!’

The major was in his car again.

‘Good luck to you!’ he cried; and ‘Good luck!’ waved John and Mary.

It was the last they ever saw of him. He fell at Soissons.

VIII

August was gone, and after it September. About midway through October Mary received a fat cheque for the book.

‘Bulbs?’ said John. He was half awake, having barely come off night duty. From three to six that morning he had patrolled the Dover Road. Like most of his neighbors he had joined the special police, releasing the regulars and younger men now called out to the war.

Mary fingered her earnings.

‘Some of it’s for Belgians,’ she said, ‘and a part of it’s for shirts and socks, and I’ll double what I gave to our Wounded Fund. It’ll be a surprise for the vicarage people. We’ve a Red Cross meeting at eleven, and a working party at four.’

‘I think we’ve surprised the vicarage people enough. I’d stick to bulbs,’ he teased her.

‘And you’ve a committee at twelve

— District Relief. Oh, John, who’d have thought it — we’re growing quite popular! ’

‘But we have n’t bought the estate

— and now it is n’t likely. Pearce, the agent, says it’ll be mutiny and desertion if we go. We talked it over at five this morning, shivering together and swapping sandwiches. I rather like Pearce. He said it was difficult to understand Americans, but now they knew us. “You’ve got to stay,” he ended; “I’ll make it right with Harrowby.”

‘Just like the vicar,’ mused Mary, ‘only he hopes we understand them better. Their boy is in the Navy. I’m working a sweater for the little chap,’ she pursued. ‘Such a small size, John; and she tried so hard to keep cheerful when she gave me the measurements. But, then, they’re all alike.’

Mary unfolded her cheque a third time. ‘I’ll tell them where it came from,’she added, ‘and that it belongs to Elmsford.’

She found her hat, and presently she disappeared.

John overtook her in the lane as they returned, in the same spot where they had first clapped eyes on Horner’s. The house stood ringed with autumn, snug and beautiful, the wood-smoke rising from its chimneys, the dahlias massed in clumps behind the stream. An aeroplane passed overhead, steering for France — to what strife, to what ruin, they could but guess.

‘Well?’ he said, with an arm about her.

‘I’m poor again, but honest,’ she laughed, ‘and I’ve made quite a sensation. There was n’t one of them that did n’t press me to go home and write another book!’