small work. Mr. Kettering
devoted a few odd minutes to showing Morgan over the establishment. As
he observed, it was not a magnificent concern; but he had it all under
his eye and by hard work made it yield him a living. Still, times were
hard and--and Mr. Kettering, having once begun to enlarge on the
subject of his disadvantages, proceeded to pour forth all the
accumulated vexations of his spirit.

Cleo remained in the parlour during the morning writing letters, but
she did not offer to enlighten Morgan as to their nature. He was
rather glad of this incommunicativeness of hers, for he felt in too
restless a mood to talk to her. Impatiently as he was awaiting Helen's
letter, he would not inquire at the post-office till the evening. He
could not bear the idea of coming away empty-handed.

Meanwhile he amused himself rummaging leisurely amid the contents of
an old mahogany book-case. He found rather a medley of worn
school-books--old-fashioned geographies and histories and foreign
conversation grammars; of mouldy novels, many in French and Italian;
of illustrated lives of actresses, prime donne, and celebrated
courtezans. Most of the novels and non-scholastic books were of a
shoddy, sensational type. Here, then, he had evidently stumbled across
the source of Cleo's early mental nourishment; this was the literature
with which her nature had found affinity. In nearly every book he took
down he came across passages underlined, with occasionally a note in
the margin in her own handwriting. The rich manner and false, pompous
sublimity of these passages brought a smile to his lips, though making
his heart contract painfully. He called to mind the books he had seen
lying about on the occasion of his memorable visit to her in company
with Ingram, and he now had an intuition that the slumbering of her
fierce activity for so many years had been facilitated by a plentiful
provision of literature of the same kind. Her imagination had found
some compensating stimulation and satisfaction in the luscious scenes
amid which it had wandered.

And suddenly he had a startled flash of memory anent a paper-covered
novel he was holding in his hands. The lithographed wrapper, with its
illuminated veiled figure and its seven mystic stars, he had seen
before; and he now recognised the book as an older copy of the very
one he had found her reading the first time he had ventured to call on
her by himself. It was the work of a lurid lady novelis