Why couldn't Paul go downstairs and look at the lady in comfort?" asked
my mother.

Derrick mused a little.

"He might look at her through a crack in the door at the foot of the
stairs, perhaps, but that would seem mean, somehow. It would be a pity,
too, not to use the gallery; galleries are uncommon, you see, and you
can get cracked doors anywhere. And, you know, he was obliged to look at
her when she couldn't see him, because their fathers were on different
sides in the war, and dreadful enemies."

When school-days came, matters went on much in the same way; there was
always an abominably scribbled tale stowed away in Derrick's desk, and
he worked infinitely harder than I did, because there was always before
him this determination to be an author and to prepare himself for
the life. But he wrote merely from love of it, and with no idea of
publication until the beginning of our last year at Oxford, when,
having reached the ripe age of one-and-twenty, he determined to delay no
longer, but to plunge boldly into his first novel.

He was seldom able to get more than six or eight hours a week for it,
because he was reading rather hard, so that the novel progressed but
slowly. Finally, to my astonishment, it came to a dead stand-still.

I have never made out exactly what was wrong with Derrick then, though
I know that he passed through a terrible time of doubt and despair. I
spent part of the Long with him down at Ventnor, where his mother had
been ordered for her health. She was devoted to Derrick, and as far as
I can understand, he was her chief comfort in life. Major Vaughan, the
husband, had been out in India for years; the only daughter was married
to a rich manufacturer at Birmingham, who had a constitutional dislike
to mothers-in-law, and as far as possible eschewed their company; while
Lawrence, Derrick's twin brother, was for ever getting into scrapes, and
was into the bargain the most unblushingly selfish fellow I ever had the
pleasure of meeting.

"Sydney," said Mrs. Vaughan to me one afternoon when we were in the
garden, "Derrick seems to me unlike himself, there is a division between
us which I never felt before. Can you tell me what is troubling him?"

She was not at all a good-looking woman, but she had a very sweet,
wistful face, and I never looked at her sad eyes without feeling ready
to go through fire and water for her. I tried now to make light of
Derrick's depression.

"He is only going through