rstand that when you're doing work like mine, the least thing out
of its accustomed place catches your eye and absolutely breaks the
inspiration: you get up to move it. I never worked back to the proper
state at all this morning. I might as well have played a round of
golf."

Helena, with a curious sensation that was almost fear--fear, it may be,
of herself--realised that his plaint, oft-heard, left her cold this
morning. Till now she had always thought how wonderful he was, how
different from her dull self, how sensitively made. To-day she
felt--she felt that it was all a needless fuss! This last half-hour
had crystallised thoughts vaguely growing during a whole year.

She could not trust herself to any comment. She felt that probably all
writers had these affectations, and yet there _was_ this sudden lack of
sympathy about the candlesticks....

"But I hope," she merely said, "the new book's working out all right?"

Hubert dropped upon the sofa, a dead weight of hopelessness. "I don't
believe," he said, "I'm meant for an author--not in these days anyhow,
when it's a trade. You know, my dear, it's too absurd but I can _not_
forget those beastly critics! They've put me off entirely. Every line
I write, I think that such and such a paper won't like that: just as
though I was writing for them and not for the public!" He took up a
magazine and flung it down violently on the sofa. "I tell you though,"
he said confidently, as though that changed his mood, and rose to go:
"I jolly well mean to get at the public, _this_ time."

"Hugh," she said, ludicrously horror-struck, "it's not another
pot-boiler?" She had not dared to ask and he had vouchsafed literally
nothing yet.

He smiled grimly, standing by the door. "You'll see," he said. "I'm
nearly through with the synopsis now and I'll read you the first
chapter soon. It's not like the last, anyhow. It's called _Eternity_.
And there's one thing," he went on with a kind of brutal joy, "if it's
a frost, we shall absolutely have to pack up and move off into cheaper
quarters: I can't afford to keep you here!"

"But, Hugh," she began in sympathetic protest.

But he had closed the door, outside.

CHAPTER XVII

THE TEMPTER

Helena did not possess the vice of introspection.

Conscious as she was that something had changed in her attitude towards
her husband's moods and work, those tyrants of her married life to
which till now she had bowed down so hu