brain that he had little time to spare for the flesh and blood inmate of
his home; and though he was always kind to Toni, he did not notice that
the laughter was absent from her lips, the joyful light of happiness
quenched in her eyes.

The idea of his book was beginning to absorb him very thoroughly.
Hitherto he had never had the time to devote to purely imaginative work;
but now that the _Bridge_ was going ahead and his series of articles for
outside papers was finished, he felt the call of fiction very strongly.

His story was concerned with the conflict between East and West, with
the life of an Indian prince who, after his English education, was
called upon to rule his dead father's kingdom; and Owen's impressions of
India, gathered during a stay of some months in that magic land, formed
a brilliant setting for the half-political, half-romantic story he had
to tell.

Barry, who was, of course, in the secret, was intensely interested in
this new departure; and had no doubt whatever as to the certainty of
Owen's success. Indeed Owen himself was surprised at the ease with which
he did work he felt to be good. By nature a critic, he would have been
the first to detect signs of carelessness, of over-fluency even in his
own writing; but the narrative, with its felicitous turns of expression,
its lucid, clear-cut phrases, slipped naturally from his pen; and he
felt to the full the truth of Stevenson's couplet:

"Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them."

One afternoon Owen invited Barry to motor down and dine with them at
Greenriver; and Barry accepted the invitation with alacrity, for he had
not seen Toni for some weeks and was anxious to know how life was
treating her.

He hurried over his work for the afternoon, and Miss Loder, the
secretary whose services he and Owen shared in common, was secretly
surprised, not to say shocked, by his flippant behaviour over a
monograph supplied by a valued contributor.

"It's a bit stodgy, eh, Miss Loder? You can feel the ecclesiastical hand
upon the pen-holder, can't you?"

Miss Loder was the daughter of a clergyman, whose large family had all
been educated with a view to doing some sort of work in the world, and
as was only natural she resented the implied censure on the Church.

"If purity of English and clarity of thought are stodgy, Mr. Raymond, I
suppose you are right. But what a treat this is after the article of
young Bright's! That was h