te package. Sometimes he sent newspapers, too, fancying
that Sanbourne saw only the local ones. They were having a discussion
through the post, the American trying to instruct the Englishman in the
intricacies of home politics; but the letter which Denin now opened did
not refer to that subject, nor did it finish with the usual appeal:
"When will the call to work get hold of you again, or when will the
spirit move you to think of writing me another book?"

"Dear Sanbourne," Sibley began. "This is an interlude, to the air of
'Money Musk'! Our custom, as you may vaguely have noticed in the
contract I forced you to sign, is to make royalty payments to our
authors twice a year. But you have bought a house and land, and Heaven
knows what all, out of your advance, you tell me. Seems to me you can't
have left yourself much margin. You mentioned the first day we met that
you were a poor man; so I have unpleasant visions of what our latest
star author may have reduced himself to, while the men whose job it is
to sell his masterpiece are piling up dollars for his publishers. The
check I lay between these pages (so as to break it to you gently) is
only a small part of what we know the 'Wedding' to have made up to
date. Never in all my experience has a book advertised _itself_ as
yours seems to have done. One reader tells a dozen others to buy it.
Each one of that dozen spreads the glad tidings among his or her own
dozen. So it goes! The 'Wedding' has now been out three months and is
in its tenth edition, the last six whacking big ones. It won't stop
short of at least a million, I bet, with Canada, England, and the
Colonies as well as our immense public here. With this assurance, you
can afford to use the present check as pin money. Yours ever, E. S."

Denin turned the page, and saw a folded slip of yellow paper: a check
payable to John Sanbourne for two thousand five hundred dollars.

He thought no more about the journalist. But the journalist was busily
thinking about him. Mr. Reid was not writing an "interview" with Mr.
Sanbourne, because he had promised he would not do that. Sanbourne had,
luckily for Reid, let his request stop there. Reid considered himself
morally free to write something else, which did not compose itself on
the lines of an interview. He wrote what he called "A Study of John
Sanbourne, Author and Hermit," making it as photographic, yet at the
same time as picturesque, as he knew how. Just as an "artist
phot