r its opening sentences. Suddenly
something magnetized them, a new interest flashed into
them; with a little nervous movement she brought the page
closer to the candle and looked at it carefully. As she
looked she blushed crimson, and dropping the paper,
covered her face with her hands.

"Oh, _Buddha!_" she cried softly, struggling with her
mortification, "no wonder they rejected it! There's a
mistake in the very second line--a mistake in _spelling!_"
She felt her face grow hotter as she said it, and
instinctively she lowered her voice. Her vanity was
pricked as with a sword; for a moment she suffered keenly.
Her fabric of hope underwent a horrible collapse; the
blow was at its very foundation. While the minute hand
of her mother's old-fashioned gold watch travelled to
its next point, or for nearly as long as that, Elfrida
was under the impression that a person who spelled
"artificially" with one _L_ could never succeed in
literature. She believed she had counted the possibilities
of failure. She had thought of style, she had thought of
sense--she had never thought of spelling! She began with
a penknife to make the word right, and almost fearfully
let herself read the first few fines. "There are no more!"
she said to herself, with a sigh of relief. Turning the
page, she read on, and the irritation began to fade out
of her face. She turned the next page and the next, and
her eyes grew interested, absorbed, enthusiastic. There
were some more, one or two, but she did not see them.
Her house of hope built itself again. "A mere slip," she
said, reassured; and then, as her eye fell on a little
fat dictionary that held down a pile of papers, "But I'll
go over them all in the morning, to make sore, with
_that_."

Then she turned with new pleasure to the finished work
of the night, settled the sheets together, put them in
an envelope, and addressed it:

_The Editor,_
_The Consul,_
_6 Tibby's Lane,_
_Fleet Street, E. C._

She hesitated before she wrote. Should she write "The
Editor" only, or "George Alfred Curtis, Esq.," first,
which would attract his attention, perhaps, as coming
from somebody who knew his name. She had a right to know
his name, she told herself; she had met him once in the
happy Paris days. Kendal bad introduced him to her, in
a brief encounter at the Salon, and she remembered the
appreciativeness of the glance that accompanied the stout
middle-aged English gentlem