you never know it.'

Dear Philippa, ever thoughtful for others! I promised to read every one
of the papers, and I was soon rewarded for the unparalleled tedium of
these studies.

CHAPTER XI.--A Terrible Temptation.

I HATE looking back and reading words which I have written when the
printer's devil was waiting for copy in the hall, but I fancy I have
somewhere called this tale a confession; if not, I meant to do so. It
has no more claim to be called a work of art than the cheapest penny
dreadful. How could it?

It holds but two characters, a man and a woman.

All the rest are the merest supers. Perhaps you may wonder that I thus
anticipate criticism; but review-writing is so easy that I may just as
well fill up with this as with any other kind of padding.

My publisher insists on so many pages of copy. When he does not get what
he wants, the language rich and powerful enough to serve his needs has
yet to be invented.

But he struggles on with the help of a dictionary of American
expletives.

However, we are coming to the conclusion, and that, I think, will waken
the public up! And yet this chapter will be a short one. It will be the
review of a struggle against a temptation to commit, not perhaps crime,
but an act of the grossest bad taste.

To that temptation I succumbed; we both succumbed.

It is a temptation to which I dare think poor human nature has rarely
been subjected.

The temptation to go and see a man, a fellow-creature, tried for a crime
which one's wife committed, and to which one is an accessory after the
fact.

Oh, that morning!

How well I remember it.

Breakfast was just oyer, the table with its relics of fragrant bloaters
and _terrine_ of _pate_ still stood in the _patio_.

I was alone. I loafed lazily and at my ease.

Then I lighted a princely _havanna_, blaming myself for profaning the
scented air from _el Cuadro de Leicester_.

You see I have such a sensitive aesthetic conscience.

Then I took from my pocket the _Sporting Times_, and set listlessly to
work to skim its lengthy columns.

This was owing to my vow to Philippa, that I would read every journal
published in England. As the day went on, I often sat with them up to my
shoulders, and littering all the _patio_.

I ran down the topics of the day. This scene is an 'under-study,' by
the way, of the other scene in which I read of the discovery of Sir
Runan's hat. At last I turned my attention to the provincial new