s no work
at all, only a shuttle plying in and out mysteriously, and lyingly doing
the deed known as tatting. She usually tied knots and had to begin over;
still, as she said, she liked the motion.

"There was a reporter here yesterday," she remarked, watching the effect
on Billy.

"The mischief there was! What for?"

"To see me. To ask about the book."

"You didn't talk to him?"

"Oh, yes, I did!"

"What did he ask you?"

"Everything, nearly. He wanted to see the Abolitionist letters I had
quoted."

"What did you say?"

"I refused. I told him they were sacred."

"Did he suspect them? Was that his idea?"

"Oh, dear, no! he wanted to reproduce some of the signatures. Then he
asked me about my novels."

"What about them?"

"How I used to write them--if the characters were taken from life. I
said every time."

"Florrie, what a pirate you are!"

"Then his eyes sharpened up like knives, and he wanted to know about the
originals. 'Dead,' I said, 'years and years ago.'"

"You didn't use to be a freebooter, Florrie. You were just a bright
girl."

"Of course I didn't. I was walking Spanish then. I was on my promotion.
I always had faith life would do something for me if I'd speak pretty
and hold out my tier. I held my tier a great many years and nothing
dropped into it. I'm an awful example, Billy, of what a woman can become
when she's had no fun. This may seem to you insanity. It isn't. It's the
abnormal and monstrous fruit of a plant that wasn't allowed to mature at
the right time. I am a mammoth squash."

"What did you tell him about your novels?"

"I told him they weren't written. They wrote themselves. My characters
simply got away from me and did things I never dreamed of. I said they
were more alive to me than people of flesh and blood."

"Do you suppose he put in all that?"

"I know he did."

"Have you seen the paper?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I haven't dared to look."

Billy Stark glanced at the floor as if he wanted to get down and roll.
Then he lay back in his chair and went gasping off. Madam Fulton watched
him seriously, that unquenchable spark still in her eyes.

"I don't know what you can do next," said Billy, getting out his
pocket-handkerchief, "unless you become engaged to me."

Madam Fulton laid down her tatting, to look at him in a gentle musing.

"It would plague Electra," she owned.

"Come on, Florrie, come on! Get up early to-morrow morning, and we'll
post off and be