h?'

'Very well indeed.'

'Has it been published long?'

'Less than three months.'

'I will take it, and everything else by the same author.'

'It is his first book.'

The stall-keeper glanced at his enthusiastic customer, and saw a sunburnt
face, eager as a boy's.

'Oh!' he said doubtfully, 'I don't know whether you will like it. It's
violently modern. Perhaps this,' and he suggested with an outstretched
forefinger a crimson volume explained by its ornamentation of a couple of
assegais bound together with a necklace of teeth. Drake laughed at the
application of the homoeopathic principle to the sale of books.

'No, I will take this,' he said, and, moving aside from the stall, stood
for a little turning the book over and over in his hands, feeling its
weight and looking incessantly at the title-page, wondering, you would
say, that the author had accomplished so much.

He had grounds for wonder, too. His thoughts went back across the last
ten years, and he remembered Mallinson's clamouring for a reputation; a
name--that had been the essential thing, no matter what the career in
which it was to be won. Work he had classified according to the
opportunities it afforded of public recognition; and his classification
varied from day to day. A _cause celebre_ would suggest the Bar, a
published sermon the Church, a flaming poster persuade to the stage. In a
word, he had looked upon a profession as no more than a sounding-board.

It had always seemed to Drake that this fervid desire for fame, as a
thing apart in itself, not as a symbol of success won in a cherished
pursuit, argued some quality of weakness in the man, something unstable
which would make for failure. His surprise was increased by an inability
to recollect that Mallinson had ever considered literature as a means to
his end. Long sojourning in the wilderness, moreover, had given Drake an
exaggerated reverence for the printed page. He was inclined to set
Mallinson on a pinnacle, and scourge himself at the foot of it for his
earlier distrust of him. He opened the book again at the beginning, and
let the pages slip across beneath his thumb from cover to cover; 413 was
marked on the top corner of the last; 413 pages actually written and
printed and published; all consecutive too; something new on each page.
He turned to a porter.

'How long have I before the train starts?'

'Five minutes, sir.'

'Where is the telegraph office?'

The office was pointed o