as than her own
feeble lines. She had imitated him, and her inability to touch his level
would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away thus, till
she observed from the publishers' list that Trewe had collected his
fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much or
little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient to
pay for the printing.

This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her
pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding
many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been
able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for
costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but
nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight--if
it had ever been alive.

The author's thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the
discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of
her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might
have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband had paid
the publisher's bill with the doctor's, and there it all had ended for
the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more
than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel
the old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she found
herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the
interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse was
among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it
here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the
landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young
man.

'Well, I'm sure you'd be interested in him, ma'am, if you could see him,
only he's so shy that I don't suppose you will.' Mrs. Hooper seemed
nothing loth to minister to her tenant's curiosity about her predecessor.
'Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even
when he's not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he
likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or
reading, and doesn't see many people, though, for the matter of that, he
is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be
friendly with him if they knew him. You don't meet kind-hearted people