listened.

"Your language, my dear Kelver," he replied, my vocabulary exhausted,
"might wound me were I able to accept you as an authority upon this
vexed question of morals. With the rest of the world you preach one
thing and practise another. I have noticed it so often. It is perhaps
sad, but the preaching has ceased to interest me. You profess to be
very indignant with me for making use of another man's ideas. It is done
every day. You yourself were quite ready to take credit not due to you.
For months we have been travelling with this play: 'Drama, in five acts,
by Mr. Horace Moncrieff.' Not more than two hundred lines of it are your
own--excellent lines, I admit, but they do not constitute the play."

This aspect of the affair had not occurred to me. "But you asked me to
put my name to it," I stammered. "You said you did not want your own to
appear--for private reasons. You made a point of it."

He waved away the smoke from his cigar. "The man you are posing as would
never have put his name to work not his own. You never hesitated; on the
contrary, you jumped at the chance of so easy an opening to your career
as playwright. My need, as you imagined it, was your opportunity."

"But you said it was from the French," I argued; "you had merely
translated it, I adapted it. I don't defend the custom, but it is the
custom: the man who adapts a play calls himself the author. They all do
it."

"I know," he answered. "It has always amused me. Our sick friend
himself, whom I am sure we are both delighted to welcome back to
life, has done it more than once, and made a very fair profit on the
transaction. Indeed, from internal evidence, I am strongly of opinion
that this present play is a case in point. Well, chickens come home to
roost: I adapt from him. What is the difference?"

"Simply this," he continued, pouring himself out another glass of wine,
"that whereas, owing to the anomalous state of the copyright laws,
stealing from the foreign author is legal and commendable, against
stealing from the living English author there is a certain prejudice."

"And the consequences, I am afraid, you will find somewhat unpleasant,"
I suggested.

He laughed: it was not a frivolity to which he was prone. "You mean, my
dear Kelver that you will."

"Don't look so dumbfounded," he went on. "You cannot be so stupid as you
are pretending to be. The original manuscript at the Lord Chamberlain's
office is in your handwriting. You kn