what we all of us go through," I said,
assuming a cheerful tone. "He has suddenly discovered that life is a
great riddle, and that the things he has accepted in blind faith are,
after all, not so sure."

She sighed.

"Do all go through it?" she said thoughtfully. "And how many, I wonder,
get beyond?"

"Few enough," I replied moodily. Then, remembering my role,--"But
Derrick will get through; he has a thousand things to help him which
others have not,--you, for instance. And then I fancy he has a sort of
insight which most of us are without."

"Possibly," she said. "As for me, it is little that I can do for him.
Perhaps you are right, and it is true that once in a life at any rate we
all have to go into the wilderness alone."

That was the last summer I ever saw Derrick's mother; she took a chill
the following Christmas and died after a few days' illness. But I have
always thought her death helped Derrick in a way that her life might
have failed to do. For although he never, I fancy, quite recovered from
the blow, and to this day cannot speak of her without tears in his eyes,
yet when he came back to Oxford he seemed to have found the answer to
the riddle, and though older, sadder and graver than before, had quite
lost the restless dissatisfaction that for some time had clouded his
life. In a few months, moreover, I noticed a fresh sign that he was out
of the wood. Coming into his rooms one day I found him sitting in the
cushioned window-seat, reading over and correcting some sheets of blue
foolscap.

"At it again?" I asked.

He nodded.

"I mean to finish the first volume here. For the rest I must be in
London."

"Why?" I asked, a little curious as to this unknown art of novel-making.

"Because," he replied, "one must be in the heart of things to understand
how Lynwood was affected by them."

"Lynwood! I believe you are always thinking of him!" (Lynwood was the
hero of his novel.)

"Well, so I am nearly--so I must be, if the book is to be any good."

"Read me what you have written," I said, throwing myself back in a
rickety but tolerably comfortable arm-chair which Derrick had inherited
with the rooms.

He hesitated a moment, being always very diffident about his own work;
but presently, having provided me with a cigar and made a good deal of
unnecessary work in arranging the sheets of the manuscript, he began to
read aloud, rather nervously, the opening chapters of the book now so
well known under th