reen Isle.
To this young student Lord Mallow, in strictest secrecy, confided Lady
Mabel's manuscript.

"Read it carefully, Allan, while I'm at the house, and make a note of
everything that's bad on one sheet of paper, and of everything that's
good on another. You may just run your pencil along the margin wherever
you think I might write 'divine!' 'grandly original!' 'what pathos!' or
anything of that sort."

The secretary was a conscientious young man, and did his work nobly. He
sat far into the small hours, ploughing through "The Sceptic Soul." It
was tough work; but Mr. Allan was Scotch and dogged, and prided himself
upon his critical faculty. This autopsy of a fine lady's poem was a
congenial labour. He scribbled pages of criticism, went into the
minutest details of style, found a great deal to blame and not much to
praise, and gave his employer a complete digest of the poem before
breakfast next morning.

Lord Mallow attended the Duchess's kettledrum again that afternoon, and
this time he was in no wise at sea. He handled "The Sceptic Soul" as if
every line of it had been engraven on the tablet of his mind.

"See here now," he cried, turning to a pencilled margin; "I call this a
remarkable passage, yet I think it might be strengthened by some
trifling excisions;" and then he showed Lady Mabel how, by pruning
twenty lines off a passage of thirty-one, a much finer effect might be
attained.

"And you really think my thought stands out more clearly?" asked Mabel,
looking regretfully at the lines through which Lord Mallow had run his
pencil--some of her finest lines.

"I am sure of it. That grand idea of yours was like a star in a hazy
sky. We have cleared away the fog."

Lady Mabel sighed. "To me the meaning of the whole passage seemed so
obvious," she said.

"Because it was your own thought. A mother knows her own children
however they are dressed."

This second tea-drinking was a very serious affair. Lord Mallow went at
the poem like a professional reviewer, and criticised without mercy,
yet contrived not to wound the author's vanity.

"It is because you have real genius that I venture to be brutally
candid," he said, when, by those slap-dash pencil-marks of his--always
with the author's consent--he had reduced the "Tragedy of the Sceptic
Soul" to about one-third of its original length. "I was carried away
yesterday by my first impressions; to-day I am coldly critical. I have
set my heart upon your poem