tranquil and gay and self-contained and perfectly
made did the Rectory seem. How clumsily I have plunged into that life,"
he sighed. "Really, Margaret, I feel sometimes like a wild beast that's
escaped from a menagerie and got into a concert of chamber-music. Look
here, you shall never have to grumble at me again. Now tell me, just to
show that you've forgiven my detestable irruption ... when Richard comes
back...."

Margaret gave him her hand for a moment, and looked down.

"And you're happy?" he asked, eagerly.

"I'm sure I shall be."

"Oh, you will be, you will be."

Pauline asked him afterwards what he had said to Margaret that could
have made her so particularly sweet, and when Guy whispered his
discovery, Pauline declared that the one thing necessary to make this
evening perfect had been just that knowledge.

"Guy, how clever of you to make her tell you what she will never tell
us. You don't know how much it has worried me to feel that you were
always angry with Margaret. How I've exaggerated everything! And what
friends you really are, you dears!"

"I've never been angry with her except on your account."

"But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort
of young Miss Verney."

They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to
go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure
of good news he would bring back with him from London.

Guy was surprised to be kept waiting when he inquired for Mr. Worrall at
three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he
had thought so much about him and so kindlily, that it seemed he must
the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian ante-chamber shake his
publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out
for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the
scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and
thence disappearing to greet him from the step.

It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the
indifferent clerk a little insistently.

"Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.

Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the
original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed
photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a
depressing accumulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy,
and the raindrops seemed from