he listened closely while he read, and though he from time to time had
seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked:-

"Frankly, what do you think of it?"

"I--I don't know," she, answered. "Will it--do you think it will sell?"

"I'm afraid not," was the confession. "It's too strong for the
magazines. But it's true, on my word it's true."

"But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they won't
sell?" she went on inexorably. "The reason for your writing is to make a
living, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's right; but the miserable story got away with me. I couldn't
help writing it. It demanded to be written."

"But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so roughly?
Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is why the editors
are justified in refusing your work."

"Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way."

"But it is not good taste."

"It is life," he replied bluntly. "It is real. It is true. And I must
write life as I see it."

She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent. It was
because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and she could
not understand him because he was so large that he bulked beyond her
horizon.

"Well, I've collected from the Transcontinental," he said in an effort to
shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject. The picture of the
bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them, mulcted of four dollars and
ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle.

"Then you'll come!" she cried joyously. "That was what I came to find
out."

"Come?" he muttered absently. "Where?"

"Why, to dinner to-morrow. You know you said you'd recover your suit if
you got that money."

"I forgot all about it," he said humbly. "You see, this morning the
poundman got Maria's two cows and the baby calf, and--well, it happened
that Maria didn't have any money, and so I had to recover her cows for
her. That's where the Transcontinental fiver went--'The Ring of Bells'
went into the poundman's pocket."

"Then you won't come?"

He looked down at his clothing.

"I can't."

Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes, but she
said nothing.

"Next Thanksgiving you'll have dinner with me in Delmonico's," he said
cheerily; "or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish. I know it."

"I saw in the paper a few days ago," she announced abruptly, "that there
had been several l