no more of bygone sadness.

I think the sea is a part of me
With its gloom and glory--
What Has Been, and what yet Shall Be
Is all its story;
Rise up, O Heart, with the tidal flow,
And drown the sorrows of Long Ago!

Something eerie and mystical there was in these words, sung as she sang
them in a low, soft, contralto, sustained by the pathetic quiver of the
zither strings throbbing under the pressure of her white fingers, and
Angus asked her where she had learned the song.

"I found it,"--she answered, somewhat evasively.

"Did you compose it yourself?"

She flushed a little.

"How can you imagine such a thing?"

He was silent, but "imagined" the more. And after this he began to show
her certain scenes and passages in the book he was writing, sometimes
reading them aloud to her with all that eager eloquence which an author
who loves and feels his work is bound to convey into the pronounced
expression of it. And she listened, absorbed and often entranced, for
there was no gain-saying the fact that Angus Reay was a man of genius.
He was inclined to underrate rather than overestimate his own
abilities, and often showed quite a pathetic mistrust of himself in his
very best and most original conceptions.

"When I read to you,"--he said to her, one day--"You must tell me the
instant you feel bored. That's a great point! Because if _you_ feel
bored, other people who read the book will feel bored exactly as you do
and at the very same passage. And you must criticise me mercilessly!
Rend me to pieces--tear my sentences to rags, and pick holes in every
detail, if you like! That will do me a world of good!"

Mary laughed.

"But why?" she asked, "Why do you want me to be so unkind to you?"

"It won't be unkind,"--he declared--"It will be very helpful. And I'll
tell you why. There's no longer any real 'criticism' of literary work in
the papers nowadays. There's only extravagant eulogium written up by an
author's personal friends and wormed somehow into the press--or equally
extravagant abuse, written and insinuated in similar fashion by an
author's personal enemies. Well now, you can't live without having both
friends and enemies--you generally have more of the latter than the
former, particularly if you are successful. There's nothing a lazy man
won't do to 'down' an industrious one,--nothing an unknown scrub won't
attempt in the way of trying to injure a great fame. It's a delightful