Miss Kinross laid down her banana skin and rose to her feet, rapidly disarmed.

"It is Miss Bibby, is it not?" she said, holding her hand out with her most pleasant smile. "My brother told me your name; now where will you sit, do you like a low chair? try this one. It is kind of you to look us up so early."

Miss Bibby sat down still struggling with her agitation.

"I," she said—"I—not a visit—should not presume—an author's time—I came simply to ask a favour of you—so great a favour I—simply feel now I am actually here that it is impossible to ask it."

"Well, you must think better of that feeling, for I really love any one to ask me a favour. I believe all stout people are the same, a little weakness of the flesh, you know"; and Miss Kinross gave her visitor a smile so winning, so encouraging, that Miss Bibby's heart began to beat in its normal fashion again.

"But first," continued Miss Kinross, "we will have some tea. Now don't say you have had yours, if there is one thing I dislike it is drinking my afternoon tea in solitary state."

No, Miss Bibby had not had tea; Thomas's letter and the Serenade together had put even her severe afternoon drink of plain cold water out of her head.

But when Miss Kinross made a favour of it like that, how could she refuse to receive a cup when the maid carried out the tray?

"Yes," she said to the query about sugar, and "Yes" to milk. And "Yes, fairly strong," when asked how she liked it. No one would have dreamed it was more than six years since her last cup.

Possibly it was the unaccustomed stimulant that loosened her tongue; possibly it was the warm womanly sympathy that shone in her hostess's brown eyes—eyes that had made more than one person declare that Kate Kinross was absolutely beautiful, despite her avoirdupois. At any rate, Miss Bibby found herself pouring out all the story of her thwarted life, all the long tragedy of the seven declined novels in the trunk across the road.

Miss Kinross gave eager sympathy. That was nothing, nothing; many authors now famous had been declined again and again.

"Seven times?" asked Miss Bibby, with gentle mournfulness.

"Certainly," said Miss Kinross stoutly. "Why, look at Hugh, it is his favourite boast that there isn't a publisher in England who has not refused him at one time or another; nor one who wouldn't be glad to accept him to-day."

"Mr. Kinross—refused!" echoed Miss Bibby. Her world seemed in need of reconstruction for a minute. Then a strange warmth and comfort gathered about her poor heart. This made the author less terribly aloof, less altogether impossible to question if she should have the happiness of obtaining an interview.

She put her request at last very timidly to her new friend.

"Do you think he would give me an interview—just a very, very short one?"

But now Kate Kinross was perturbed.

"My dear girl," she said (all women she liked were "dear girls" to Kate), "I simply dare not ask him. He has stood out against it so persistently all these five years. He simply hates publicity; he says all he asks is to do his work, to do it as he likes, and to go his own way as unmolested and as privately as a bricklayer does."

"But just a very, very short one," pleaded Miss Bibby. She went on to tell Kate about Thomas's letter, the editor's offer, this chance of a lifetime for herself.

Kate almost groaned.

"Five years have I kept them off him," she said, "five whole years, and not one interviewer have I even allowed to get across the doorway! And you would have me plot against his peace like this!"

Miss Bibby urged no more, just sat still and swallowed heroically once or twice, and then said smilingly that it "didn't matter at all."

But Kate's keen eyes were on her all the time. Something about this slender woman with the grey, half-startled eyes, and the soft mouth that quivered so easily, and the soft, thin cheek where the pink pulsed to and fro as rapidly as in a young girl's, touched her curiously.

She stood up at last and put a hand on her visitor's shoulder in a hearty, encouraging way.

"My dear girl," she said, "come along, you shall have your chance. He had his, I'll remind him of that. He will probably never forgive me, but I will risk that. Come along."

"But not now—you don't mean now?" gasped Miss Bibby, shrinking back in actual alarm, for her hostess seemed seeking to pilot her into the house. It would certainly take a week or two to persuade the author, she counted, and she herself would consequently have that length of time in which to screw up her courage.

"Certainly now," said Miss Kinross, "this minute. Why not? He's only in that room across the hall."

"Oh, oh," gasped Miss Bibby, "I—I must have time—I—I daren't—Oh, Oh—don't knock at the door—for Heaven's sake."

Kate laughed and drew back one moment.

"My dear girl," she said, "he's not in the least brutal, as he seems from his books. You couldn't meet with a more harmless man if you hunted for a year. Don't you be alarmed—why, you silly girl, you are actually trembling! He is nearly as stout as I am, and much more good-natured, and you're not afraid of me. Now, come along."

She opened a door without knocking and put in her head.

"Hugh," she said, in as bland a tone as she could call up, "I have brought a lady to interview you for the Evening Mail. I have assured her you will not object. Well, I shall see you again in half an hour, Miss Bibby."

And Miss Bibby felt herself pushed gently into the study of Hugh Kinross, and all retreat cut off behind her by the silent closing of the door.



CHAPTER IX

THE INTERVIEW FOR THE "EVENING MAIL"

Kate could hardly have chosen a more inopportune moment. The hero, who had troubled Hugh's repose in the moist atmosphere of the city, persisted in behaving in an untoward fashion, even when translated to an altitude of three thousand feet or so. He still perorated, still posed like a shop-walker, still behaved like a puppet, with its pulling strings in plainest evidence.

It was a mercilessly hot afternoon. All over the mountains the tourists were asking themselves in bitterness of spirit why they had left their comfortable homes in the city to subject themselves to weather like this. They all had the feeling of being wronged out of their money; the hotel-keepers, the house-agents, had lured them here under false pretences, and positively deserved punishment.

The sweat of heat and mental exertion poured down Hugh's face. He had followed his usual plan of work this year, that of drifting pleasantly along for nine months, jotting down a few notes, and writing a chapter now and again; and then pulling himself sharply together, and trying to work like a horse, and get all his ideas reduced to paper, corrected, re-written, and made ready for Kate to type in three months. Every New Year's Day he sat with Kate and mapped out a plan of work for the fresh year, that was to be utterly dissimilar to this reprehensible practice. Sometimes they got paper, and planned out each month's work, so many chapters to the month; it was surprising how simple it all looked, put down like that. For instance, one book a year, when a year consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days, was not too much to expect from a moderately active man in full possession of his health and faculties. One book a year represented say, thirty chapters, sixty or seventy thousand words. Seventy thousand words, divided by three hundred and sixty-five days, represented less than two hundred words a day. It looked like child's play—on the sheet of paper. It fairly astonished Hugh when he saw the whole question of his authorship thus reduced to its simple factors in black and white. Kate had typed the remarkable memorandum for him last year, and pasted it on a card, so that he might prop it up before him on his desk as a constant reminder.

Two hundred words a day! He used to spend much of the early part of January leaning back in his chair, happily planning out the accomplishment of two or three books which had long been in his head, but which want of time had hitherto prevented from getting as far as his writing-block. Yes, he determined (in January) that it was more than possible to have the whole three finished by next December; he was not married, his time was his own, he could order his days as he pleased, and turn night into day, and day into night, exactly when he chose. Why, when the good moods came, did he not write five thousand words a day, easily, eagerly! And this steady writing of a couple of hundred words a day would bring the good mood often, no doubt.

Yes, he would finish the three books this year—the subjects were all to his hand—and possibly the play he had had tucked away in his mind so many years. And some verse, too—the luxury of verse was very dear to him.

Brave January with the sun of resolution flaming high in the sky!

It was December now.

The poet might have as truly spoken of the facilis descensus to December as to the torrid region he mentioned.

It was December, and Hugh's first book still wanted forty thousand words to complete it. The other two works, the play, the verses, were still in the pale nimbus that ever plays tantalizingly around an author's desk.

It was December and the publisher was clamouring for copy. In the proud insolence begot of January's shining possibilities and Kate's neat memorandum, Hugh had promised his book by August.

And the long-suffering, kindly publisher, sympathetic over an author's mood, had refrained from overmuch pressing of his claim for three months. But it was December now and he was growing restive; the MS. had to be typed, had to waste five weeks at sea, to be read in London, to be placed as advantageously as possible for serial rights in various countries, to be illustrated, to be printed, proofs had to be sent out for correction, to be returned, ten more weeks had to be lost at sea, and yet the book be published in the sacred season of autumn, nine short months hence.

The publisher was restive and Hugh desperate.

He had sworn to himself this afternoon nearly as fiercely as Pauline had that he would not leave the room until he "got it right." Pauline was granted the relief of tears. Hugh could only give vent to his tumult of mind by tearing off his collar and hurling it into one corner of the room, peeling off his coat and flinging it under his table, and kicking off his white canvas shoes. These last he had purchased from one of the shoe-makers in the township only this morning, having neglected to put any footgear at all in his portmanteau. And being only two and elevenpence—none better were kept in stock—the shoes were badly cut and pinched him atrociously.

One at present reposed, sole upwards, on a chair where it had alighted after a vigorous aerial flight, and the other stood its ground in the middle of the floor.

And this was the manner of author Miss Bibby found herself suddenly shut up with for an interview destined for the Evening Mail!

Hugh spun round in his chair at Kate's bland voice. He probably imagined he was in his revolving-chair at home, but he was not, and the frail article beneath him, unused to gyration upon one leg, gave way instantly and all but precipitated him at full length before his visitor.

Max, who an hour before had impugned the butcher's impurity of language, would have found that in some respects a butcher and an author were men and brothers.



There was only one word; but the vigorous deliverance of it made Miss Bibby catch her breath and clasp her hands.

"I have startled you, madam," said Hugh, facing the "limp lavender lady" as he had called her to Kate; "and I ought to apologize, I am aware, but I don't. I would have apologized had I been betrayed to it in a drawing-room. But this is my work-room, where I see nobody." The last four words were almost thundered.

Agnes Bibby was praying—actually praying for courage. Her throat was working, her grey eyes had their most startled look. She was twisting her hands nervously together.

Hugh was not in the least conscience-stricken at her evident lack of composure.

He seriously considered for one second the expediency of repeating the word, and adding a few others to it, and so scaring the lavender lady out of his room and out of his life for ever.

But then he noticed she was actually trembling, and though his savage impulses were still well to the fore, he dragged up a chair and said "Sit down."

Miss Bibby sat down uncertainly, still gazing at him as if half expecting he might pounce on her and eat her at any second.

"And now what incredible thing was it I heard my sister say?" he asked.

"She—Miss Kinross—was good enough to try to help me to—an interview—a very short one—with you," said Miss Bibby, gathering breath and strength with the opening of her mouth.

"An interview! And my sister—my sister, Kate Kinross—is party to it!"

"She was willing to help another woman," said Miss Bibby.

"Ah," said Hugh, "I see, the two of you have plotted together to entrap a defenceless man."

Miss Bibby ventured on a faint smile, for the author was certainly smiling now. How was she to know, as Kate might have done, that it was his dangerous smile?

"Well, I hope you are going to forgive me, and grant my request," she said.

"And if I don't—if contumaciously I refuse?" said Hugh.

Surely Miss Bibby's prayer for courage was answered. She looked him gently in the eyes.

"I should try again," she said; and when he laughed at her fluttering audacity, she actually added, "and still again."

"I see, I see," he said, "I'm plainly powerless. Well, 'if 'twere done at all, then 'twere well it were done quickly.' Fire away, Miss Bibby; just regard me as a lamb led to the slaughter." There was a twinkle in his eye so demoniac that Kate would have been truly alarmed.

But now Miss Bibby was at a disadvantage. "I—unfortunately I have come unprepared," she said. "I did not expect to get the interview for quite a week. I brought no pencil and paper, and I might forget something you say." She looked distressedly at his table.

"Oh, don't mention a trifle like that," said Hugh urbanely; "permit me to lend you my fountain-pen"—he handed it to her—"and, this writing-block, is that sufficient paper?"

"Oh, quite," she said gratefully.

"Now then," said Hugh, and he leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyelids over his wicked eyes, "I will answer any question you like to put to me."

"How good you are!" breathed Miss Bibby.

Then there was a dead silence in the little room.

"Well," said Hugh, opening his eyes, "why don't you begin? It cannot be that compunction has suddenly seized you, I fear."

The woman's grey eyes wore their startled look again, there was the pink flag of distress on her cheeks.

"I—I cannot think of any of the questions I should ask," she said chokingly. "I meant to have carefully studied other interviews; I did not expect to have it so suddenly. Oh, what can you think of me for wasting your time like this?" She made a motion as if to rise and go. But Hugh waved her back to her chair.

"Possibly," he said with smoothest courtesy, "I may be able to help you. It would be a pity to let such trifles prevent you from earning money. I presume you will be paid for this?"

"Oh yes," said Miss Bibby, "I am offered six guineas for it."

"Ah! And you need the money?"

"Well, I am not actually in want of it," said Miss Bibby, "but——"

"But you could do with it, I see; most people can, can't they? Well, let us get on. You want to know all about my private life, don't you?"

"Oh," said Miss Bibby, shocked. "I should not like to intrude like that. Just simple questions, I—I think they generally ask where you were born."

"No, no," said Hugh; "you haven't studied the question, it's plain. The public don't care a hang nowadays where or how or when a man's born. What they want to do is to lift the curtain suddenly from his home and see him going through the common round of his daily life. By George, wouldn't they like to catch him beating his wife! A glimpse like that would make an interviewer's fortune. 'Pon my soul, Miss Bibby, I'd give you the chance—you are so indefatigable—if I had such a thing as a wife."

Miss Bibby laughed nervously,

"I—I think they like to know about an author's methods of work," she said, "if you would be so very kind."

"Certainly, certainly," said Hugh. "I rather pride myself upon my methods, now you come to mention it. I don't believe there's an author extant or underground with similar. See this card?" He rummaged on his table for Kate's neatly-typed little memorandum.

"Yes?" said Miss Bibby breathlessly.

"That's my daily allowance, two hundred words. Couldn't sleep a wink if it were a hundred and ninety-nine. Pull myself up sharp even in the middle of a speech if I find I'm likely to make it two hundred and one."

"How very interesting!" said Miss Bibby, scribbling hard. "A whole day, polishing two hundred words! No wonder the critics speak of your crystal style, Mr. Kinross. It reminds me of what I have read of Flaubert's methods."

"Then," said Hugh dreamily, "I have a few other little methods of work, though so trivial and so essentially personal I don't know whether you would find them worth mentioning."

"Oh, anything, anything, Mr. Kinross, if you will be so kind," said Miss Bibby enthusiastically.

"Well," said Hugh, looking pensively around his work-room, "I am a man of rather curious habits. I may say my habits have become part of my nature. Certain spells are necessary to get me into proper vein for my two hundred words. For instance, my collar—you may have been surprised to find me collarless, Miss Bibby."

Miss Bibby hastily expressed the sentiment that nothing he could do could surprise her; then saw the difficulties of the sentence, and grappled hard with it to reduce it to a polite form that should express the fact that a great author is above all the petty bonds that bind the rest of the world, and must be expected to act accordingly.

But Hugh was evidently not listening to her.

"Most authors, I believe," he said, "when working, wear their collars in the place intended by nature—or should I say the manufacturers?—namely, around their neck. I cannot write one word until it is in the corner of the room."

Miss Bibby made a note of the curious fact.

"And, mark you," said Hugh impressively, "it has to be the left-hand corner, facing the door, or the charm won't work."

"How very strange!" murmured Miss Bibby.

"Then my shoes," said Hugh. "There are authors, doubtless, who can write with these in their customary place—upon their feet. I cannot. My soul is too large, too chaotic. But perhaps you are not interested in men's shoes, Miss Bibby?"

He was regarding sadly the one of his own that stood in the middle of the floor.

"Oh, an author's shoes," murmured Miss Bibby.

"Well then, curious as it may seem to you, that, too, has become one of my spells," said Hugh, "my feet unfettered beneath my table. One shoe a little pointed to the right in the middle of the room; another, sole upwards, on a chair three and three-quarter feet distant from its fellow."

"Absolutely remarkable!" gasped Miss Bibby. She looked at him, a pencil poised a little hesitatingly. Was this thing possible? Was the great author then not quite, quite——she hardly liked, even in thought, to use the word sane?

"Oh, of course," said Hugh diffidently, "the fact may not seem worth mentioning in your article, but it is my experience that there is nothing which so endears a celebrity to his public as his little eccentricities."

"You are quite right," said Miss Bibby, "perfectly right, and indeed you are very, very good to make them known to me."

"Not at all, not at all," said Hugh graciously. "Anything else? I like to read myself, in these interviews, what time a writer gets up and goes to bed."

"Oh yes," said Miss Bibby, "that will be very interesting."

"Well," said Hugh, carefully fitting the finger tips of one hand on to the tips of the other, "I rise at a quarter to five, winter and summer, and get a cool two thousand off my chest while yet my fellow men are buried in slumber. And——"

"Excuse me," said Miss Bibby, "I don't quite follow—two thousand what, Mr. Kinross?"

"Words, of course," said Hugh.

"B—b—but," hesitated Miss Bibby, "I thought you said two hundred a day."

Hugh blinked a moment.

"My dear Madam," he said, "you have doubtless heard me called a stylist. Every one of those two hundred words I erase five to ten times, polishing, substituting, seeking to express myself better."

Miss Bibby was writing fluently again.

"This," said the author, "occupies me until half-past six, when I take three baths, one hot, one cold, one—like the church of the Laodiceans—neither. This stimulates me marvellously."

Scratch, scratch went the fountain-pen.

"After this," said the author, "I walk ten miles along a level road, and three through a hilly country, during the last mile of the latter practising the deep-breathing exercises so highly recommended by the medical faculty."

Scratch, scratch, the pink cheek flag deepening with pleasure.

"On my return I go through a short course of exercises for the muscles, answer a few letters while I am cooling down, and then breakfast."

"It must be eleven o'clock by then," ventured Miss Bibby.

"Eleven o'clock it is," said Hugh, after a moment's consideration.

"And for breakfast," said Miss Bibby. "Do you—do you eat ordinary things? It would be so interesting to know."

Hugh was about to instance eggs and bacon in exaggerated quantities, when he realized that they were much too gross for such a paper. So he shook his head.

"I attribute my perfect health and clear and active brain solely to the cautions I observe with my diet," he said slowly. "No meat, no drinking at meals, no bread, no puddings. There are excellent substitutes," he picked up negligently from his desk a small packet that had been sent—an advertisement sample—to him by the morning's post, and had not yet been disposed of.

Miss Bibby wrote on, glowing with fellow-feeling.

"In conclusion," he added, "I am a strict teetotaler, and I never smoke."

Then it occurred to him "Greenways" might have seen the red end of a cigar on the "Tenby" verandah, and he added, "except an occasional cigar under medical orders."

He rose from his chair and gazed pensively at his black socked feet.

Miss Bibby fluttered up at once, handed back his pen, and hurriedly tore off from the block her last written sheet.

"I can never, never thank you enough," she said, and held out to him a hand that somehow pleased him, and made him compunctious at the same time—such a white, slender, gentlewoman's hand it was.

But then he remembered his hero had not yet proposed, and assuredly would not to-day after such an interruption. He told himself that she had deserved all she got, and that she would, at all events, earn the six guineas she was so eager about.

"Oh, don't mention it," he said gallantly, and turned her over to Kate, who was just coming along to satisfy herself that actual murder had not been committed.

She fluttered back one moment, however, just as he was closing the door.

"I believe interviews have to be signed as authentic by their subject, have they not?" she said; "forgive me for troubling you again."

"Oh, have they?" he said. His fountain-pen was in his hand. "Where shall I put the signature? I suppose you will copy all this out again; suppose I write on this blank slip?"

"That will do nicely," she said.

"I guarantee this to be an authentic interview, Hugh Kinross, his mark," he scrawled lazily across the page.

When he took his seat at the tea-table that night Kate came behind him and kissed the top of his head, an unusual mark of affection, for they were an undemonstrative couple in general.

"Dear old Hughie," she said, "you have given delight to more than one person."

"I believe I have, K," he said genially.



CHAPTER X

ANNA ENJOYS ILL-HEALTH

"Anna," said Miss Bibby, with happy eyes the next morning, "I am going to take a whole holiday to-day."

"An' about time," said Anna, "I've been wonderin' how long you could keep it up, Miss Bibby. You've not had one yet, and me half a dozen. I don't have half as much to do with those childerun as you, but if I didn't get away from them sometimes I'd get hysterics."

"I am sure they are very good children—wonderfully good, Anna," said Miss Bibby.

"Oh yes, they're good enough," said Anna, "but so uncommon lively. And talk! They keeps it up, one after the other, and sometimes all four at a time, till your head spins round like a top. I got quite giddy goin' down to the waterfall with them yesterday, and it wasn't the steps, neither, it was just their tongues going at it, clackerty-clack all the time. What time will you be back, Miss Bibby?"

"Oh," said Miss Bibby, "I should not think of going away for my holiday, Anna. Mrs. Lomax knows nothing would make me leave the children so long, while she is so far away. But since she begged me to take a day a week to myself, I am going to shut myself in my room to-day. I have very important work."

"Working him a pair of slippers, I'll undertake," ran Anna's thoughts. But aloud she said, "Yes, you do, Miss Bibby. I'll keep them youngsters away from you; you get a good rest while you're about it."

The heartiness in her tone was due to the fact that she was about to ask for an extra special holiday for herself in a day or two to attend the Mountain Bakers' picnic at a distant waterfall.

So Miss Bibby disappeared into her room for the day, after having written down the children's meals in her painstaking fashion on the kitchen slate, and given the tradesmen's orders, and seen the children happily engaged in their favourite game of Swiss Family Robinson.

Anna sighed with relief; gentle as Miss Bibby was she had a way of keeping people up to the mark, and on a warm day like this, a well-executed policy of "letting things slip" appealed to the imagination.

Miss Bibby came back a moment.

"Anna," she said, "I have neglected to give Master Max and Miss Lynn their medicine, will you call them in and give it to them? I do not want to waste time."

Anna undertook the commission.

"Don't know what I'm thinking of; I forgot my own doses," she muttered as she went to the dining-room for the bottles. Max had been ordered a pleasant preparation of malt to fortify his little system during his convalescence, and Lynn an iron tonic. The other two were making such excellent recoveries nothing was needed.

Anna reached the two bottles from the cupboard, measured out with a steady hand a tablespoon of the malt, and swallowed it, then followed it by a teaspoonful of Lynn's iron. She looked at herself in the sideboard mirror as she did so. "I don't think I'm looking any better," she said mournfully.

Anna keenly enjoyed the worst of health.

She was an anaemic-looking girl with a pasty complexion, and hair several shades too light to correspond comfortably with it.

Ill-health was the only subject in life in which she took a genuine interest.

Miss Bibby supposed Anna quite a reader, so often did she find her deep in a paper, and so the girl was—of medical advertisements. The marvellous recoveries of persons like Mrs. Joseph Huggins, of Arabella Street, Chippendale, who had been given up by six leading doctors after suffering from a blood-curdling list of ailments for seventeen years, and had been cured after taking one bottle, were a source of unfailing interest to Anna.

And never did an advertisement offer free a sample bottle of any drug, no matter for what purpose, but Anna sent instantly and claimed it.

It needed nothing but the announcement on Max's malt bottle of its tissue-building qualities, and its power of restoring the waste of nature in the human frame, for the girl at once privately to take a course of the same treatment and, as the chemist's bill might have testified, from the same bottle.

Similarly with Lynn's tonic; the accompanying pamphlet said something about its invigorating powers and the restoration of red corpuscles to the blood, so Anna at once prescribed it for herself also—out of Lynn's bottle.

And Miss Bibby's Health Foods that that lady paid for out of her slender purse—Anna determined that it was these things that gave the temporary head of the house that curiously delicate clear skin of hers; so being by no means satisfied with her own complexion, she consistently assisted herself to a small quantity of each, without, it need hardly be stated, foregoing any of her hearty meals at the kitchen table with Blake the gardener.

Miss Bibby had certainly been vaguely surprised at first at the rapid lowering both of the children's medicines and her own tins, but never dreaming of suspecting so unusual a cause, soon grew entirely accustomed to it, and imagined it was the normal consumption.

Her own constitution thus fortified, this morning Anna called loudly through the window for Max and Lynn to come in this instant and take their "medsuns."

Max came eagerly; he was so fond of his treacley spoonful it was a marvel he had not of his own accord jogged some one's memory and insisted upon the omission being rectified.

But Lynn's tonic embittered life for her for a considerable time before taking, as well as for several minutes afterwards, until a long drink and a chocolate removed the nauseous taste.

She was playing this morning, before Anna's call, in a mood of chastened joy.

Her conscience was always a prickly little affair, and forced her to confess to her sins almost before she had committed them. But she told herself this morning that it was certainly no business of hers to point out to Miss Bibby Miss Bibby's forgetfulness. And she was just comfortably settled up in the big quince tree as Fritz, in "Falconhurst," when that soul-vexing cry about "medsun" shrilled through a window.

"'Tend you don't hear; it's only Anna," said Pauline in swift sympathy.

Lynn flattened her body along a bough and drew up a possibly betraying leg.

"Do I show?" she whispered.

Paul shook her head, and moved with Muffie hastily away from the tree and began to run towards Anna, who, failing to obtain her quarry with a shout, was now seen rapidly coming to the Island of the Robinson family, late of Switzerland.

"Anna," shouted Pauline, one of the most resourceful young people in the world, "have you seen Lynn anywhere?"

Anna pulled up.

"No, I haven't," she said.

"Are you sure she's not in the house?" persisted Paul.

"If she is and heard me calling, I'll give it to her, or my name's not Anna," said that maiden irately.

"Do you think she can have gone again over to 'Tenby'?" pursued Pauline.

"That's it—that's what's got her," said Anna; "and fine and mad Miss Bibby will be with her, going worrying that book-man again. Well, I'm not going trapesing over there in this sun, but I'll make her take two doses at lunch if I have to put it down her back."

And with this frightful threat Anna returned to the house.

Poor Fritz nearly fell out of "Falconhurst" in his agitation.

"Oh, I think I'll go up and take it, Paul," she said; "two doses together would be too awful."

Her eyes grew round with horror at the mere thought.

"You could shut your teeth hard, after the first spoonful," said Paul, "and refuse, firmly refuse more."

"You could spit it out," said Muffie eagerly, "like when they gave me the castor-oil; and it was the last in the bottle, so they couldn't give me any more."

"But there are gallons more in my bottle," Lynn said dolefully, "and you heard what she said about putting it down my back."

"Look here," said Pauline, the judicial look of her father in her eyes, "that's just talk about putting it down our backs. I thought it all out that day Muffie ate the green peach. You know Miss Bibby said then she'd put it down her back—the castor-oil, you know. Well, if I'd been Muffie I'd just have said, 'All right, do.' Do you think they would have done so, and got her clothes all nasty and greasy? Not they, they think far too much of clothes. But even if they had—well, it might have been a bit sticky, but it would be better than taking stuff like that down your mouth."

This was marvellous perspicacity of thought; Lynn looked admiringly down at her sister, and Muffie stood, with her mouth open, digesting this freshly-minted fact, and making clear resolutions for all future consequences of green peaches.

They fell to playing again, Lynn remaining in the tree, however. Mrs. Robinson now engaged in sewing skin coats with a porcupine needle and flax, since the more active part of Fritz, shooting and shouting down below, was fraught with too much danger.

"I can't make Tentholm, 'less I have the diny-room tablecloth," said Muffie.

"Well, go and get it," said Pauline.

"All right," said Muffie, making a line for it, then calling back, just as a little sop to duty, "she said we weren't to, though."

"Run up and ask her," said Lynn, a law-abiding little person so long as the iron did not enter her soul or body.

Muffie dashed into Miss Bibby's bedroom after the briefest knock, and made her request.

"Yes, yes," murmured Miss Bibby, looking up with bright eyes from some writing she was engaged upon, "just this once, dear, but be careful not to——"

But Muffie had sprung away again, and what she had to avoid with the cloth, whether tearing it into holes, or getting mud on it, or losing it, or wetting it, she did not wait to hear. It is possible Miss Bibby did not even finish the sentence—her eyes looked absent-minded enough for such a lapse.

Muffie went gleefully back to Robinson Island, the art-green serge trailing behind her.

"We can have it, we can have it!" she announced gleefully, "only we're to be careful not to—come on, fasten it on to the sticks, Paul."

Miss Bibby had reached the chronicle of Hugh Kinross's "endearing little eccentricities."

A small pile of neatly written sheets lay to the right of her. In front of her lay more sheets, scored through, corrected, polished, until Flaubert himself would have been satisfied with the labour bestowed.

She had worked steadily through the night, the silent night in the hills, her lamp the only household eye still open in miles of black slumbering country.

At three o'clock she had flung herself down and snatched a few hours' sleep, but by seven she was up again, the same quivering excitement in her veins. A little more polishing, then a fair copy in her very neatest hand, and she might bear it up to the four o'clock post, and send it flying forward to the Evening Mail.

The envelope that would hold it would hold also her destiny, she told herself. This was the most important crisis of her life; she had travelled nearly forty years—thirty-six to be exact—along a road of life, not rough and stony as many a road is, but just dull and level and monotonous and dusty, as are so many excellent highways. But now she stood at two crossroads, and saw stretching before her one in no wise different from that she had traversed so long, and the other a glittering tempting path springing joyously up a high hill, on the top of which, in the shade of laurel trees, sat at ease the whole goodly company of great authors. She fancied they were beckoning to her; she heard sweet voices from them throughout that feverish night—"Come up higher, Agnes Bibby," they were saying.

The interview was the first step along this second path. The story, already promised space for, would be the second. And then, from out the bitter gloom of the trunk, the novels would emerge, one after the other, the world graciously holding out its hand for them.

"Miss Bibby," said a mournful voice at the door, "Miss Bibby."

"Oh, dear," sighed Miss Bibby, "what is it now, Max?"

Max entered with a wool door-mat depending from his collar and just reaching his shoes.

"I have no tail," he said, his lip drooping, "an' Paul an' Muff's got late big long ones."

"Oh, dear!" said Miss Bibby, after a frantic glance round her own apartment in search of an appendix, "I have nothing that would do, Max. Do run away, darling. Pretend you've got a tail, that is just as good."

Max gulped threateningly.

"Laindeers have leal tails," he said.

Again a frantic glance around. "Would a towel do if I pinned it on, dear?"

Max shook his head.

"In the lawning-loom lere's a tail on the curtains," he said, "but it's showd on tight."

"Well, ask Paul, ask Anna, ask some one else to look for something for you; but you mustn't come to me, darling, this is Miss Bibby's holiday, you don't want to spoil it for her, do you?" Miss Bibby looked at him beseechingly.

But Max's lip drooped lower and lower. Outside in the garden pranced Muffie and Pauline, a long tasselled drawback from the dining-room curtains, sweeping magnificently after each of them.

They had thought of them first, they insisted and, strongest reason of all, had got them first. Max had better be a sheep or a Manx cat, and not bother about a tail.

But Max, after a heart-breaking attempt to remove the drawing-room tie-back, which some over-provident person had stitched firmly in its place (as if anticipating unhallowed use being made of it), Max had gone bursting with his woes to the one who held his mother's place.

"Please run away, darling," said Miss Bibby again.

But Max sank down to the ground, and lifted up his voice in a bitter howl.

"Mamma—I want my mamma," he yelled, as if he thought that by pitching the key high his voice might sound across the watery waste that separated her from him.

Miss Bibby was not proof against this; in fact it is just possible that Max had long since discovered that this mode of appeal was the most successful one he could essay.

She kissed and comforted him and, holding his hand, went out of the room in search of some article that would lend itself to the present necessity.

Max dragged her to the drawing-room.

"Cut it off," he said, temptingly, "you've got lissors."

There is no doubt whatever that in the circumstances Mrs. Lomax herself would have promptly given the much-desired article.

But Miss Bibby had established herself as anxious caretaker of the household chattels as well as children.

"Oh, darling!" she said, "I couldn't possibly. Mamma's pretty tie-back to trail in the dust!"

"I wouldn't lail it on the paths, only on the lass," said Max.

But Miss Bibby still shook her head, and Max began to work up from low down in his breast another howl.

Then Miss Bibby had a brilliant notion. She caught sight of a length of rope hanging on the verandah post, relic of a hammock that had gone the way of most hammocks.

"Where is a knife?" she said, "and run and get me a comb, Max."

In five minutes she had half a yard of the excellent material beautifully unravelled, and Max was crazy with pride and eagerness to burst out upon the envious gaze of his sisters thus caparisoned.

He could hardly wait for the realistic affair to be fastened firmly to his belt, but kept saying, "be quick, be quick, Miss Bibby."

"I think I deserve a kiss, Max," she said wistfully, holding the eager little man a moment to her; this baby of the family had made himself a very warm corner in her heart.



Max kissed her hurriedly.

"How much do you love me, darling?" persisted the misguided lady.

Quite conceivably Mrs. Lomax was in the habit of putting this question also, but had learned the wisdom of confining it to sleepy and leisure moments, and not obtruding it upon the strenuous time of play.

Max struggled away. "Big as th' sea, big as th' stars, big as this loom, big as anything," he said hastily. It was his customary formula after this troublesome question.

"You dear little boy!" said Miss Bibby, kissing his soft young cheek. Then he shot away through the door, and she went back with rapid steps to the collar habit of Hugh Kinross.



CHAPTER XI

MISS BIBBY'S HOLIDAY

Miss Bibby worked another half-hour, perhaps. She was nervous and excited; she had set herself to catch the four o'clock post, and there still were numbers of pages with which she was dissatisfied. She was essaying, indeed, an impossible task—trying to couch Hugh Kinross's eccentricities in dignified English prose. And the shoes, at least, absolutely refused to be so treated; they seemed to stand out from the article just as prominently as they had stood out among the furniture of his room.

Miss Bibby sighed despairingly—the strain and the loss of sleep were telling upon her.

"Miss Bibby," shouted Pauline, bursting into the room, "Miss Bibby, Miss Bibby!"

"Run away," said Miss Bibby; "run away at once, Pauline. Surely it is not much for me to ask to have one day—just one day to myself."

"Quick, quick!" cried Pauline, "Muffie's stood on an ant-bed, and she's swarming!"

The shoes and the far shade of the laurel trees dropped instantly from Miss Bibby's horizon and, the horrors of the situation overwhelming her, she flew after Pauline to the victim.

The child's condition was piteous; absolutely mad with terror and pain, she was rushing about on the path, Max, yelling with sympathy, tearing after her. Lynn, at the first frantic moment when she saw her sister's high white socks turned black with their live covering, had leapt towards her and, with hands and pinafore, had essayed to sweep the things off. But the assailants were as alarmed and angry at their position now as the attacked and, while some sought safety by running up Lynn's sleeves, thus forcing her also to dance and scream, the remainder swarmed higher and higher up the luckless Muffie.

Miss Bibby's presence of mind quite deserted her. The whole of her note-book seemed to zig-zag vainly across her brain—her note-book where she had carefully written down antidotes for any poisons the children might swallow, remedies for scalds, burns, cut fingers, sprains, snake-bites. There was nothing about ants! Yet something must be done and instantly—the feet were the worst.

"Quick, quick! give me your foot, Muffie," she cried.

The child wildly stuck out one leg.

And Miss Bibby with her slim white hands seized the shoe—the shoe all black with its fierce, prickly living mass—unlaced it and dragged it off. Her own arms were alive in a moment, but she merely bit her lip and began to pull at the sock.

"What insanity of folly!" cried Hugh Kinross, sweeping her nearly off her feet, "here, where's the bath-room?"

Pauline dashed on to lead the way, and Hugh ran the two afflicted little girls hurriedly before him with one hand, and Miss Bibby grasped firmly by the shoulder with the other.

Once in the room, he turned on the three taps, hot, cold and shower, all at the same time, and followed this by dropping both children into the water.

"You'd better follow them," he said, for Miss Bibby was fidgeting about as if afflicted with St. Vitus's dance in her arms and shoulders. "Is there any ammonia in the house? Never mind, I'll go across and get some from Kate."

He strode away and Miss Bibby did not lose a minute in following his advice.

He gave the bottle to Anna on his return, Anna, who had only just come back from the end of the orchard where she had found it necessary to go and ask Blake—leisurely—for some parsley. She was open-mouthed at what had happened.

"Here's the armonia, Miss Bibby," she said, going into the bath-room, "and you're to—to pollute it with some water and rub it on hard. Here, will I be doing, Miss Lynn?"

The children were gasping and gurgling now with laughter at the funniness of the whole affair, and even Miss Bibby was smiling a little at the drowned appearance of all of them.

She applied the ammonia to the bites, then left Anna to help the children into dry clothing, while, having carefully ascertained that Mr. Kinross had quite gone, she ran along the passages to her own bedroom, a limper lavender lady than ever.

While dressing she peeped between the laths of the blind, agitated, now the disturbance was over, to think of the sudden arrival of Hugh upon the scene. What a masterful man he was! How he had grasped her shoulder and pushed her along! But, oh! how stupid—how stupid he must have considered her for not thinking of water for the poor children herself! Yes, he had called it an insanity of folly! She peeped mournfully through the blind.

And across at "Tenby" now was a wagonette, with Mrs. Gowan and two such pretty, fashionable girls in it! And out came Hugh with a small portmanteau in his hand, and rather a better suit on than he generally wore, and certainly a better hat.

And Kate came after and kissed him good-bye!

Was his holiday, then, over? Was he going back to town? Oh, no, of course! Had not Lynn said he was going to the Jenolan Caves for a week with his other sister and her party? But Lynn had not said anything about those very pretty girls! Miss Bibby sighed, she knew not why, as the wagonette drove away.

Then, in a mood from which all buoyancy had fled, drowned probably with the ants in the unexpected bath, she began to work at the interview again.

A mile along the way Hugh gave an exclamation of annoyance; not so strong certainly as the one Miss Bibby had overheard, but still indicative of much vexation.

"I went expressly to 'Greenways'," he said, "to deliver a communication, and that ant business drove it out of my head. I'm really afraid I shall have to turn back."

The ladies protested a little. Was it very important? As it was they would barely make the first twenty-five miles of the journey, and reach the first hotel of their route before dark.

"Yes," said Hugh, really perturbed, "it is important—rather. I'm afraid I'll have to go back."

The coachman sulkily brought his horses round; the "ant business" had kept him waiting at "Tenby" gate nearly half an hour, and he had a strong objection to arriving at hotels when the dinner hour was long past and the cook, pettish at having to set to work again, quite callous about what she set before him.

But at the critical moment Larkin appeared—Larkin who had a perfect genius for appearing on the spot when he was wanted.

"Hello! here's Middlecut to the rescue," Hugh cried, hailing him with a shout. "Hi, young man, can you go off on a message for me?"

Larkin grinned and nodded assent. He had no notion why the book gentleman always gave him this name of Middlecut, but he had also no objection. Any gentleman who made his commission advance by leaps and bounds, as this one had done, was at liberty to call him any name that came handy.

Hugh had his fountain-pen, but no further vehicle for his message; none of the ladies could help him with as much as a visiting card—what help in emergencies can be expected from pocketless persons?

Larkin came to the rescue with the eternal card of Octavius Smith and his bacon at elevenpence.

"Dear Madam" (wrote Hugh upon the back of this choice stationery), "kindly burn any nonsense I may have said to you yesterday. On my return in a week I will see what I can do to give you better information. I was on my way to tell you this when Muffie's engaging adventure drove it out of my head. Pray excuse this card—necessity knows no etiquette.

"Yours,

"Hugh Kinross."

A minute later the wagonette was gaily upon its way again, Hugh in excellent spirits now he had laid the little demon of compunction that had been troubling his kind heart since breakfast.

And Larkin was cantering happily down to "Greenways," his own pocket (he kept his right-hand pocket for the money due to Octavius, and his left-hand for his own tips) the heavier by a shilling.

"Miss Bibby, Miss Bibby!" cried Pauline.

"And now what is it?" said Miss Bibby, whose nerves by this time were in a condition that made the reiteration of her own name a positive offence to her. She was dressed for going to the post, and had a long official envelope directed "To the Editor of the Evening Mail" tucked under her arm. But she had paused by the kitchen fire on her way out to superintend the blancmange which Anna was making for the children's tea, and which, they complained bitterly, she always made lumpy.

"Larkin is at the door," said Pauline, "and he's got something for you from Mr. Kinross."

"Where, where?" said Miss Bibby, fluttering forward. Larkin passed the card to Pauline. Pauline passed it to Miss Bibby—and on such small things does our destiny hang—the wrong side up.

That is to say the nauseating statement about the prime middle cut at elevenpence a pound was what met the eye of the eager Miss Bibby.

An ebullition of anger such as rarely visited the gentle lady rose within her now.

She flung the card angrily into the fire.

"You are a very rude little girl, Pauline," she said; "it is excessively ill-bred to play jokes upon people older than yourself. And as for Larkin——"

But Larkin had disappeared, his shilling being earned, and some business urgently needing his attendance.

Pauline slipped away to the garden, a resigned look upon her face. She had not meant to be ill-bred; she had no idea she was playing a joke. But she remembered now that Miss Bibby had several times swept down the cards of Octavius that they had placed on the drawing-room mantelpiece as a means of attracting any visitors' custom to Larkin. Still she need not have spoken in that angry tone, and called her "ill-bred." "Ill-bred" was a very uncomfortable word to have suddenly thrust upon one. Pauline leapt up at the gymnastic bar, and swung and wriggled there to shake it off.

Hot and perspiring after several brilliant efforts, that included hanging by the feet, and swinging upwards again, and resuming the perpendicular, Pauline climbed up and sat on the bar, holding to a post and dangling her legs.

From here through a break in the trees she could see the hill, and climbing up it steadily, steadily, Miss Bibby with her long precious envelope for the post tucked beneath her arm.



CHAPTER XII

IN BLACK AND WHITE

Four days later Kate was reading, rocking and eating banana again in the privacy of the little side verandah, when there came a familiar tramp across the room behind her.

"It can't be Hugh," she said aloud, for it had been allowed by the whole party that the seven days of a week were not too long to devote to the thorough "doing" of the marvellous caves.

"By George though, can't it?" said that gentleman as he came through the doorway, dropped his bag on one chair, and sat down heavily on another.

Kate laughed at him outright; his linen suit was red over with fine dust, dust lay half an inch deep on the brim of his Panama, his very eyebrows were red with the molecules of the mountain roads.

"Well, my girl," he said, "it was worth it—well worth it. Blessed be motor-cars henceforth and forever, though hitherto I've never had a good word to throw at one. Great Scott! to think of it; but for the chance of one chap laying another fifty to a hundred that his car could do the journey down in ten minutes under the other chap's, those girls would be jabbering in my ears yet."

"But I thought they were such wonderful girls," said Kate amusedly; "'ducky little girls', you called them, and 'little pets'."

"That's all very well," said Hugh; "little pets are very nice in their place, and no one appreciates them better than faithfully yours, for an hour or so. But when you get 'em for breakfast and lunch and dinner. And they even insist upon trifling with the holies of your smoking times, trying to light up cigarettes themselves, and jabbering all the time, why then you seize on a civil offer to risk your neck in a racing car as a drowning man would catch at a torpedo if he found it floating handy."

"You seem to have returned heart-whole, at all events," said Kate; "and I've had my suspicions of you."

"No," said Hugh, fanning himself composedly with a newspaper, "my day is not yet, though as I've told you before I'm like the fellow in the comic opera, there is that within me that tells me that when my time does come the convulsion will be tremendous! When I love, it will be with the accumulated fervour of sixty-six years! But I have an ideal—a semi-transparent Being filled with an inorganic fruit jelly—and I have never yet seen the woman who approaches within reasonable distance of it. All—all opaque—opaque—opaque."

Kate laughed. "Then I'm afraid you don't feel much better for the change," she said.

They had both hoped that a week's "junketing" with lively companions might bring back the pen's good hour.

"Better!" he groaned, "why the day you let that Bibby woman loose on me I was a flowing river compared to my mood to-day."

At that a recollection evidently came over Kate, some memory that the unexpected arrival had driven away, for she froze visibly.

"I will go and make you a lemon-squash," she said coldly; "you are possibly thirsty."

"Thirsty!" said Hugh, "my outward and visible dust is nothing to what I've swallowed! Make me six lemon-squashes. But what's the matter, Kit?"

She made no answer, merely turned one severe glance on him and went off to the pantry.

"Do tell me, Kate," he said, after he had lowered the large jugful she brought him, and still she had made no further remark. "Nothing's happened to the bike, has it? You've not smashed your precious nose? No, it seems intact. Has the low-spirited Ellen given notice? Has Octavius been charging more than elevenpence for his bacon?"

But Kate preserved a stony silence; she even picked up her book again and affected to read. He drew the volume out of her hands.

"I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry."

"I don't feel as if I could ever be merry again with you, Hugh," she said.

"And here have I," he said, addressing the verandah ceiling, "passed through dangers enough to make me loved, Othello-wise, for themselves alone. Dangers of culverts, dangers of sharp turnings, dangers of blue metal, of precipices, of wandering cows, of naphtha explosions. Here have I turned myself into a demd damp moist unpleasant body just to get to her sheltering bosom and she repulses me like this."

"It is because I am what I have never been before, Hugh," said Kate, "and that is ashamed of you."

"Ashamed? Of me, my joy!" said Hugh, but he knew now that it was the interview outrage that was disturbing Kate. "It knows it is talking demd charming sweetness but naughty fibs. It knows it is not ashamed of its own popolorum tibby."

"Which is entirely attributable," said Kate, unable to resist keeping up the vein, "to the gross misconduct and most improper behaviour of Mr. Mantalini."

"Of me, my essential juice of pineapple!"

"Of you, Sir!"

"Will she call me, Sir!" cried Hugh, "me who doat upon her with the demdest ardour! She, who coils her fascination round me like a pure and angelic rattlesnake! It will be all up with my feelings; she will throw me into a demd state."

"Hugh," said Kate, "it is far too serious a matter for nonsense. I consider it was not only unkind but unmanly."

"My cup of happiness's sweetener," said Hugh, as he took out his pipe and his tobacco and his matches with much deliberation. "You brought it upon her yourself and she has you to blame." He filled his pipe with tobacco and rammed it well in. "It will be a lesson to you"—he struck a match—"and I trust to her"—he tilted his chair back and puffed once or twice—"to let an inoffensive man go on his way unmolested. And now my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry."

"But you might have given her the lesson privately," persisted Kate, and her eyes kindled. "The unmanly part comes in when you callously allow her to become the laughing-stock of town."

"What!" thundered Hugh, and he brought his chair so suddenly and heavily back to its four-legged condition that the frail thing responded with an ominous creak. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Didn't you know she was going to sign the interview with her own name?" asked Kate, glad to find there might be some extenuating circumstances.

"You don't mean seriously to tell me she's gone and published that fool of an interview?" Hugh shouted.

"I do seriously so mean," said Kate.

"Go and get me the paper," he said.

Kate brought him the Evening Mail of two days back.

And there in black headlines he read—

"The only interview Hugh Kinross has ever granted."

"A lady beards the lion in his den and extracts most interesting particulars."

"The eccentricities of a great author."

When Agnes Bibby's neat MS. had reached the Editor of the Evening Mail that gentleman had fairly shouted with laughter, for he knew Kinross and his habits well. And this perfervid and most serious account was in truth very funny.

He found himself quite unable to resist so unique an opportunity of raising a roar of laughter among his readers. Therefore, telling himself that Kinross had too much humour to be seriously annoyed, and holding himself protected by the well-known signature authenticating it, he had at once blue-pencilled the article and sent it precisely as it stood into the hands of the foreman printer. His twinkling eye had practically swept over without noticing the modest signature at the end of the article, "Agnes Bibby (Burunda)." Else, for the sake of Thomas downstairs, if not for the lady herself, he would have scored it through and let the laugh go against an anonymous contributor.

But things move rapidly in the office of an evening paper, and the foreman ran through the first proofs and the sub-editor through the second, and neither thought of removing that poor little name at the end.

And now the article was two days old and quite famous. There had not been a copy left of any of the editions.

"Well, well," said Hugh as he seized the paper, and ran his eye over the paragraphs concerning his collar habit and his shoe habit, and his ante-prandial energy,—"the laugh's only up against myself, and I'm not thin-skinned." Then he saw the signature at the end, "Agnes Bibby (Burunda)," in large, clear type.

"By George!" he said; "by George, Kate! That's rough on her." He breathed hard. "Do you think she has seen it yet?"

"Seen it!" said Kate, and her voice actually choked a little. "The poor girl is breaking her heart over it. I have never known any one feel anything so acutely. Of course she must have realized it was all a joke the moment she read the Editor's facetious comments. And then it seems she has a brother in the office, and he has written to her a brotherly letter explaining elaborately how she is the laughing-stock of the whole town."

"By Jove!" repeated Hugh; "by Jove!" He seemed quite stunned. "Have you seen her yet, K? Does she seem at all cut up?"

"Seen her!" repeated Kate, her mouth a-tremble with sympathy. "Yes, I went over at once, and she saw me coming and ran this way and then that to get away from me. And when she couldn't she just dropped down against the bank on the lawn and sobbed and cried as heartbrokenly as Muffie might have done."

"I say!" said Hugh. He gulped a lump from his throat. "I say!"

Then he turned on his heel and strode through the cottage and over the verandah and through the "Tenby" garden and across the road and away down "Greenways" drive.

"Bless the boy!" said Kate, wiping her eyes. "I know he didn't mean to hurt the poor thing."



CHAPTER XIII

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE INTERVIEWER

He could hardly wait to ring the bell; the front door was open and seemed to suggest that he should stride in and march directly to the room from which children's voices were coming and where the victim of his brutality most likely also was sitting.

But he thought better of such behaviour and loudly rang the bell.

Anna came down the hall, evidently trying to restrain a giggle at his dusty appearance.

"Is Miss Bibby in?" he demanded sternly.

Anna looked uncertainly at the sitting-room door. "I—don't know for certain. Will I go and see?"

"Yes, immediately, please," said Hugh.

She did not ask him in at once: instead she took a few steps to the sitting-room door, opened it, giggled at the children, smoothed her face and turned round again.

"She's not in there, sir," she said. "Will you come in and sit down, and I'll go and see if she's anywhere else?"

Hugh strode into the sitting-room.

"Well, you'd think he'd wash hisself afore he came calling on a lady," said Anna to herself as she went in search of Miss Bibby, "an' brush his dirty hat. If that's what making books brings you to, give me bread," and she sent a loving thought to a certain dapper baker of her acquaintance.

In the sitting-room Pauline had screwed herself round and round on the piano stool till her knees were higher than the keyboard and she was able to contemplate her Serenade from a new point of view. She looked at Hugh in some excitement but without speaking.

Lynn, Muffie and Max had evidently been at work on their letters, but had all evidently pulled up suddenly, for each displayed a blot as a full stop.

Max was the first to recover himself. He remembered he had a use for this man.

"Did you ling me a lalagmite?" he demanded.

"Oh, yes," cried Muffie, "our stalagtites,—did you break some off? We knowed a boy that got one in a dark cave when the guard wasn't looking and pushed it up his sleeve to carry. Did you?"

"Not this time," said Hugh; "but look here, young people, I didn't come to see you to-day. Where's Miss Bibby?"

At this question Paul began to revolve faster and faster on a downward journey simply to save herself the embarrassment of answering, and Lynn fell to writing a new sentence in her letter with great assiduity.

But Muffie had no qualms.

"She doesn't want to see you, and she said we could talk to you and she wasn't at home," she answered.

"But she doesn't know yet who it is," objected Hugh.

"Yes she does," said Muffie, "she sawed you coming up the path."

"An' she lushed out of the loom," volunteered Max.

"Well," said Hugh, "she's got to see me, for it's very important. Will you go to her room, Muffie, and say Mr. Kinross begs to see her as a special favour?"

"Oh," said Muffie, "she isn't in her room. When you say you're not at home you go and stand out in the garden till the visitors go."

"You don't," argued Lynn, "only Mrs. Merrick; but mother says 'No,' an' she never does, an' it just means 'engaged,' only it's not so rude."

"Well," said Hugh desperately, "will you penetrate to the spot in the garden where Miss Bibby's notions of honour may have taken her, Lynn, and say Mr. Kinross will be greatly obliged if she will see him for five minutes?"

"I really couldn't," said Lynn distressedly. "I'm very sorry, but I'm sure she wouldn't like me to."

"Very well," said Hugh, "I shall simply go and find her myself," and he pushed up the French window and stepped out into the garden.

"We gen'ally hide ahind the waratahs or the bamboos, or up a tree's a good place," said Muffie, much interested.

If it were hide-and-seek about to begin, this is where Max shone. He laid down his pen and slipped down from his chair.

"I'll find her for you," he said. "I find licker than any one. Once I found Paul an' she was lapped up in the sheets in the linen less."

But Hugh had made off towards the bamboos without any help. He could see a moving dress beyond the loose striped leaves.

At the sound of footsteps on the gravel the skirts moved rapidly away.

"So!" he said to himself. "Very well, Miss Bibby, it's not dignified for persons of our age, but you'll give up this chase before I do."

She must have realized this, for, when they neared the waratahs she stood absolutely still and waited.

"You're in for it now, my fine chap," Hugh said to himself, "and she'll weep—she's just the sort to weep. Well, you jolly well deserve it, you brute."

Then he walked up to her.

She wore a dark blue cambric to-day with a soft leather belt and dainty white muslin cuffs and collar as a relief. The costume suited her infinitely better than the limp lavender had done.

The colour was ebbing and flowing in her cheeks; her grey eyes wore their startled expression. But she held out her slim hand, albeit it trembled a little.

"Good-morning, Mr. Kinross," she said, "slightly pleasanter weather, is it not? Though I rather expect a thunderstorm, and then perhaps that will be the end of heat waves this summer. What do you think? Must we expect another?"

"Er——" said Hugh, "I really don't know."

"Mrs. Lomax writes that it is delightful in New Zealand just now—just like fresh spring weather all the time. Both she and the Judge are feeling better."

"Glad to hear it," said Hugh, "but——"

"They are at Rotorua at present," Miss Bibby persisted. "The Judge is fortunate enough to have among his memories that of the country before the Pink and White Terraces were swallowed up. But they write that all is very beautiful still. Of course you have been in New Zealand, Mr. Kinross?"

"Miss Bibby," said Hugh, "I did not come to talk of Pink and White Terraces to you before I removed the dust of my journey. I want to tell you how sorry——"

"I would rather talk of the Terraces, Mr. Kinross," Miss Bibby said, with a gentle dignity of manner that surprised him. But her soft lip quivered one moment.

"And, by George, Kate," he said afterwards, recounting the interview to his sister, "I nearly kissed her on the spot—just like I do you when I've been ramping round and have hurt you and want to make up. She was taking it so gamely."

"But I must talk of it," he insisted. "What a low ruffian you must consider me! I——"

"Oh, no," she said, "I—I quite understand now. I was importunate and at an infelicitous time. I recognize that I brought it upon myself. Well, people will forget about it presently—a new sensation will come along," she smiled faintly.

"I was in a vile temper that afternoon, certainly," he said, "and I treated you shamefully. But what I do want to make you realize is that I would have cut off my hand rather than have made you—or any one—publicly ridiculous. Will you believe that?"

She only looked at him very gently and without speaking.

"Don't you remember my coming up here—four or five days ago now? I was coming to tell you to burn the stuff, and then you know one of the youngsters stirred up an ant-bed and drove it out of my mind."

"Yes," she said politely; "oh, yes, that was quite enough to put it out of your head." But she looked away from him.

"Then, as you know," pursued Hugh, "I have been at the Caves ever since. But I took the precaution the moment I remembered to send you word."

Now she was looking at him. "I received no message."

"That scoundrelly young Larkin—do you say that he did not bring you a note from me?" he cried.

"No, I had no note," she said faintly. "He must have lost it or have forgotten to bring it."

"That is it," said Hugh, "but I still blame myself. I ought to have turned back when I remembered and not have trusted a lad."

"There he is now. Oh, Larkin! Larkin!" murmured Miss Bibby in the tone Sir Isaac Newton must have used when his dog Diamond did him the irreparable mischief.

Yes, there was Larkin, riding gaily off down the path to the gate, an empty basket swung on one arm. He had just received another commission from Anna—a large bottle of patent medicine and a complexion remedy, and as he had lately extended the field of his operation by acting as a sort of travelling agent (on commission) for a chemist in an adjoining village, it brought the piano and the grocery emporium a little closer.

Hugh gave a peremptory whistle and the boy looked over his shoulder, then responded to the beckon by bringing his horse sharply round and cantering briskly across to the waratahs.

"Something else, Miss Bibby, ma'am?" he said, whipping out his order book.

"What do you mean by not delivering the note I gave you from the wagonette on Thursday?" said Hugh angrily.

"I did deliver it!" said Larkin in much indignation, "which I can say honest, sir; I never neglected a message yet. And that's why our business is what it is."

"Whom did you give it to?" said Miss Bibby. "Was it to one of the children?"

"Not much, ma'am," said Larkin, in open scorn. "I don't do business that ways, knowin' well what kids—begging yer pardon, children are. I did hand it to the oldest of 'em, certainly, but I took the precaution, Miss Bibby, ma'am, to stay at the door till I seen her hand it to you. You was standin' by the fire and I seen it acshally in yer hand."

"But that was no letter," said Miss Bibby, a faint recollection stealing over her, "it was one of your trade cards."

"It was on one of those I wrote," said Hugh, "having no other paper. I remember apologizing for using it."

"And I burnt it!" said Miss Bibby in a stricken tone. "Tossed it on the fire without a glance—I thought they were playing me a trick! Poor Pauline—I—must apologize to Pauline."

"You can go," said Hugh to Larkin, "and here's a shilling to wipe the momentary slur off from your character."

And Larkin rode off, vindicated, slapping the left-hand pocket of his trousers.

"Does it make my crime a little less brutal?" said Hugh gently.

She put out her slim white hand again.

"Let us forget about it," she said; "I shall soon live it down." Her eyes flashed for a moment bravely up to his.

He gripped her hand hard, shook it several times, and told her she had behaved in a manner altogether more generous than he deserved.

"If you want to make me a little more comfortable in my own mind," he said as he was leaving, "you will give me something to do for you. Can I—my sister tells me you write a great deal and—and have not had any very great fortune with the editors and publishers yet. Is there any MS I could read—and perhaps presume to offer a little advice upon? It would make me very happy—that is, if you have sufficient confidence in me."

The humble, anxious note in his voice would have amazed several score of his readers who had written to him to ask him, since he was a literary man, to read through an accompanying bulky parcel of MS, advise about its faults and give hints about publishing. For these persons—anathema maranatha to all authors—received by return of post one of a large packet of printed slips that stood ever ready on Hugh's desk, and learned briefly that "Mr. Hugh Kinross, being neither a literary agent nor a philanthropist but merely a working man with a market value on every hour, begs to repudiate the honour his correspondent would do him, and informs him that his MS will be returned on receipt of stamps to cover postage."

Miss Bibby was not proof against this offer. She gave Hugh one look of intense gratitude and hurried into the house, returning presently with a small roll of typewritten MS—her latest creation, Hypocrites.

"This story," she said quite tremulously—"Oh, I am so anxious, so very anxious about it. The editor of the Evening Mail—has promised to use one of mine; it will be—well, not quite my first story in print, but certainly the first one paid for. There is such a difference, isn't there? Nearly any one can get a story into print if they want no remuneration. You can understand how anxious I am that it should be good. I sent it to be typed in town so that it would present a better appearance. It has just come back by the post. Oh! if you could spare time to glance at it. Is it too much to ask?"

He laughed at her. "A bit of a story like that—three thousand words at the most! You are too modest, Miss Bibby. You should have brought me a packet weighing about half a hundredweight as the rest of them send me."

"No, no;—just that I am pinning all my hopes on Hypocrites." A wave of pink was in her cheeks, her eyes shone softly.

"With the greatest pleasure in life," said Hugh heartily, and tucked the little roll beneath his arm. "And now I had better go and wash my face, or Kate will be coming after me with a sponge and towel."



And back he went to "Tenby," while Miss Bibby with a much less heavy heart returned to her interrupted "one, two, three, four" with Pauline.



CHAPTER XIV

THE LITERARY MICROBE

"We are contagious," Pauline announced honestly and courageously at the advent of every stranger, however interesting.

And Lynn, equally careful it has been seen, refused to hold any intercourse with the author at "Tenby" until the searching question, "Have you had whooping cough?" had been put to him.

Yet here was Hugh Kinross himself taking no precaution whatever to protect the neighbouring "Greenways" from contagion, and the result was that the literary microbe was wafted across the road in a surprisingly short space of time.

Miss Bibby certainly could not be said to be infected for the first time, though there was no doubt that since the new tenants had come to "Tenby" the disease had taken a much more aggravated form with her.

But Anna one afternoon made a solemn excursion to the store of Septimus Smith and purchased one exercise-book, one pen, one bottle of ink and one blotting-pad.

She had hitherto regarded the making of books as some occult art practised by certain persons, mostly as dead and as distant as one Shakespeare whose fame had faintly reached her.

But when there came into the unpretentious cottage across the road the actual author of a printed book that lay on a table in the drawing-room; and when this actual author was discovered on near view to be a rather stout man with a shockingly bad hat and creases all over his linen coats; and when the maid who dwelt in the same house with this actual author testified, during the course of a gossip, that he was in no wise different from other men—which is to say, he made no end of a fuss if the toast was not to his liking and threw his burnt matches down anywhere, and shouted angrily if there was no soap in the bathroom—why then, when all these things were discovered, Anna simply walked up to the store one fine afternoon and set herself up in the stock-in-trade of an author, marvelling that it had never before occurred to her to write a book.

But after she had done a very few chapters she craved a reading audience. Blake the gardener, she determined, was too surly for this office, and too sleepy; his day's work so near to Nature's heart and at such an altitude made him nod by seven o'clock in the evening. And one could hardly follow after him as he trundled about with his barrow in the daytime and read aloud to him how it was discovered that the lovely Annabell Deloitte, who was a nursery governess in a lord's family, had been changed in the cradle and was really the Lady Florentine Trelawney.

And Miss Bibby, for all her gentleness, was too "stand-offish" for the position of listener. Anna at once rejected any idea of asking that lady to undertake the work.

But the children made a delightful audience and clamoured eagerly, the moment they reached the foot of the waterfall, for the "book" to be produced from the secret recesses of Anna's umbrella (in which it hid itself from Miss Bibby's eyes), and for the enthralling woes of the Lady Florentine Trelawney to be at once continued.

So it may be concluded that it was Anna who acted as the direct vehicle for the transmission of the literary infection to the children themselves.

The logic of the matter was very simple.

If Anna could write a book—Anna who was to be frequently seen with black smuts from the stove all over her face; Anna who did not know that the reign of William the Conqueror was 1066 to 1087, nor where sago came from, nor what were the calyx and the stamen of a flower (had they not themselves tested her?)—well, if Anna could make up a book, so could they—every one of them.

"It will cost us twopence each," said Pauline calculatingly, "but we can afford it; it's nearly the day for our sixpences again."

"I wanted my last tuppence for some pink wool—can't you find some paper in the house?" said Muffie on discovering that the disbursement Pauline declared necessary was for mere paper.

"No," said Pauline firmly; "authors always have plenty of clean paper. I won't use the half sheets Miss Bibby gives us to scribble on."

"No, no; do let us use proper paper," cried Lynn, who had had far too many poetic fancies nipped in the bud for want of this precious transmitting material.

So the purchases were made and the eightpennyworth of paper made a very respectable show upon the table of the summer-house, to which they had retreated to ensure privacy to themselves for the arduous undertaking.

Pauline sat at the head of the table, the others ranged almost meekly around her. Hers was a responsible position and she intended them all to realize it.

For while it was one thing for all to say lightly, "We will write a book each," the matter resolved itself into all the actual writing falling to Pauline, for the sad and simple reason that none of the others could write.

So Pauline leaned back and gave herself airs.

"I shall write my own story first," she said, "and you are none of you to speak a word to interrupt me, or I won't write yours at all. Max, stop scratching on the table; Muffie, don't shuffle your feet like that, you put my vein out." The last was a slightly tangled remark picked up from Miss Kinross who had been heard to speak of various interruptions putting her brother out of vein.

Muffie, thwarted in her desire to scratch a horse upon the surface of the table, fell to filling up a crack in it with sand scooped up from the floor and mixed, when the writing lady was not looking, to a pleasing consistency with ink.

Lynn lay face downwards on a bench and bent all her energies to composing the story that Pauline would shortly write at her dictation.

Max simply strolled to the door; the little girls might be under Pauline's thumb, but no one expected him really to obey any one except his father.

"Call me when you're leady," he said to Pauline, "I'll be sitting on the loof."

And Muffie, suffering from her enforced inactivity, soon had the tantalizing sight of sections of his brown legs displayed through the lattice work above her head.

Scratch, scratch went Pauline's pen—scratch, scratch along line after line. Evidently she was not troubled with any lack of ideas.

Twenty minutes, half an hour slipped away. Lynn had long since composed her tale and had fallen to playing a fairy drama at the end of her bench with bits of moss and white pebbles from the floor.

Max had tumbled twice through a hole in the lattice roof, and had on each occasion blotted Pauline's precious MS by the precipitation of his whole body upon it.

Sore, therefore, about his knees and elbows, he had given up his lofty perch and betaken himself to his oft-essayed task of digging a hole in the ground, to reach the fire that the kindergarten governess had informed him burnt in the middle of the earth.

And Muffie now occupied the seat on the summer-house roof, and did not lose the opportunity of demonstrating to Max that girls kept their balance much better than boys.

"I've finished—come and listen," cried Pauline at last.

Lynn sat upright at once and tried to disentangle her drama from her story. Muffie slid comfortably down from her perch. But Max was not ready.

"Wait a minte," he cried, "I'm nearly down to the fire—oh, oh, I can feel it on my hand—I b'leeve my spade's aginning to melt."

But Pauline insisted on his instant attendance within doors.

"'Once upon a time'," she began, "'there was a beautiful mother'."

"As beautiful as ours?" asked Lynn.

"Beautifuller," said Pauline.

Lynn argued the point hotly, with Muffie to back her.

"She couldn't be," they said.

"Yes, she could—in a book," said Pauline. "I'm not talking about really truly, of course. But in a book they can be as lovely as lovely."

"So is mother," said the little girls stoutly.

"Oh, of course," said Pauline, and her heart softening to the distant dear one, she said, "Well, 'once 'pon a time there was a mother as beautiful as our mother, and she died'."

"Oh, oh," said Lynn. "Oh, I wish mamma was here. Oh, I don't like your story a bit, Paul."

"Silly," said Paul, "this is only a book mother—it doesn't hurt book mothers to die. Now just stop interrupting me. Well, she died—she's just got to die or the rest of the story can't happen. The beautiful mother died, 'and one day when Emmeline was sitting in the spachius drawing-room of the castle—'"

"Who's Emmeline?" asked Muffie.

"Oh, how stupid you are," cried Pauline; "she's the daughter, of course,—'sitting in the spachius drawing-room of the castle her father strode in, and he led by the hand a very horty lady. "This is your new mother and I command you to obey her, my lady Emmeline," he said. Emmeline fainted to the ground.

"'Her father the noble lord was always out at his office and didn't know how the horty step-mother treated Emmeline, but she grew thinner and paler every day, and all her face went transparant and the blue veins were trased in their pallor and her little hand was like a skellington's; and the cruel step-mother made her do all the scrubbing and hard work, and treated her like a menient. And one day the Lady Emmeline disappeared and was never found again. But twenty years afterwards the wainscotching in the castle was being mended, and they found her lying behind it, her long eyelashes resting on the marble pallor of her cheeks, her little hands clasped in their last long sleep, quite dead. And the noble lord wept bitterly and resolved never to have another step-mother, and he built a monyment with a white angel to her memory'."

Lynn was quite moved by the story, and gulped down a sob which made Paul most gracious and grateful to her.

But Muffie sniffed. "Well, she was a silly," she said. "Why didn't she bang and kick on the wall like the time I hid in the cupboard and the door got shut? Every one heard me in a minute."

"Wainscotching's much thicker than common cupboards," said Paul disdainfully.

"I'd have got my axe and chopped and chopped and walked light out and chopped off the woman's head and put her down my hole," said Max.

Then it was Lynn's turn.

She dictated rapidly, occasionally waving her arms dramatically to heighten the effect.

"'A key lay on the ground. The moon was up. Purple was on the mountains, and all in the valley lay the snow-white mist. Black pine trees stood in a long, long row, like the ghosts of tall soldiers. The sun was setting, and orange and purple flamed in the sky. The moon was very young and thin and was just climbing up the other side of the sky. The sun——'"

"Oh, I say," said Pauline, "isn't anything ever going to happen? I'm tired of the sun and the moon. I always skip that kind of thing in books."

"Oh, Paul!" said Lynn, "that's the best part. You can make such lovely pictures."

"Go on," said Paul.

"'The sun was——'"

Pauline folded her arms. "I won't write another word about the sun," she said.

"Well, the moon—" said Lynn beseechingly. "Just say 'the moon looked like a far-off silver boat.'"

"No," said Paul; "you've said once it looked like a starved baby."

"I didn't," said Lynn indignantly.

"Yes—'young and thin,' that's the same thing," said Pauline. "Now get on to something else. What about the key?"

"'The key lay on the ground'," said Lynn resignedly, "'and sparkled in the darkness'."

"Keys don't sparkle in the darkness, but go on," said Paul, writing away.

"This one did," persisted the poor little authoress; "the fairies had smeared it with that phis,—phos,—oh, you know, that lovely shiny stuff we saw on the sea at night when we were in the ship."

"I know," shouted Max; "lat-poison, like they put down at the tables to kill the lats."

"It wasn't," said Lynn angrily,—"rat-poison indeed,—it was like burning gold."

"Go on," said Pauline wearily.

"'Su'nnly out of a snow-white lily stepped a beautious fairy. She had——'"

Scratch, scratch went Pauline's pen over a couple of pages; the fairy's eyes were described and likened to stars and other shining things; her ears, her teeth, her neck, her arms and hands were all lingeringly and lovingly enumerated and described.