at Maxwell would not look forward to.
There could be no real anxiety for them in the situation, but for
Maxwell there was care. He might be going to get a great deal out of the
play he was now writing, but as yet it was in no form to show to a
manager or an actor; and he might be going to get a great deal out of
his old play, but so far Godolphin had made no sign that he remembered
one of the most essential of the obligations which seemed all to rest so
lightly upon him. Maxwell hated to remind him of it, and in the end he
was very glad that he never did, or that he had not betrayed the
slightest misgiving of his good faith.

One morning near the end of the month, when he was lower in his spirits
than usual from this cause, there came a letter from the editor of the
Boston _Abstract_ asking him if he could not write a weekly letter from
New York for his old newspaper. It was a temptation, and Maxwell found
it a hardship that his wife should have gone out just then to do the
marketing for the day; she considered this the duty of a wife, and she
fulfilled it often enough to keep her sense of it alive, but she much
preferred to forage with him in the afternoon; that was poetry, she
said, and the other was prose. He would have liked to talk the
proposition over with her; to realize the compliment while it was fresh,
to grumble at it a little, and to be supported in his notion that it
would be bad business just then for him to undertake a task that might
draw him away from his play too much; to do the latter well would take a
great deal of time. Yet he did not feel quite that he ought to refuse
it, in view of the uncertainties of the future, and it might even be
useful to hold the position aside from the money it would bring him; the
New York correspondent of the Boston _Abstract_ might have a claim upon
the attention of the managers which a wholly unaccredited playwright
could not urge; there was no question of their favor with Maxwell; he
would disdain to have that, even if he could get it, except by the
excellence, or at least the availability of his work.

Louise did not come in until much later than usual, and then she came in
looking very excited. "Well, my dear," she began to call out to him as
soon as the door was opened for her, "I have seen that woman again!"

"What woman?" he asked.

"You know. That smouldering-eyed thing in the bathing-dress." She added,
in answer to his stupefied gaze: "I don't mean that she