t happiness.

Its roses were not the only merit of this ideal retreat, though in the
summer months they made it difficult for one with eyes and nostrils to
appreciate the others. There was a delightful room running right through
the cottage; and it was here that Langholm worked, ate, smoked, read,
and had his daily being; his bath was in the room adjoining, and his bed
in another adjoining that. Of the upper floor he made no use; it was
filled with the neglected furniture of a more substantial establishment,
and Langholm seldom so much as set foot upon the stairs. The lower rooms
were very simply furnished. There was a really old oak bureau, and some
solid, comfortable chairs. The pictures were chiefly photographs of
other writers. There were better pictures deep in dust upstairs.

An artist in temperament, if not in attainment, Langholm had of late
years found the ups and downs of his own work supply all the excitement
that was necessary to his life; it was only when the work was done that
his solitude had oppressed him; but neither the one nor the other had
been the case of late weeks. His new book had been written under the
spur of an external stimulus; it had not written itself, like all the
more reputable members of the large but short-lived family to which it
belonged. Langholm had not felt lonely in the breathing spaces between
the later chapters. On the contrary, he would walk up and down among his
roses with the animated face of one on the happy heights of intercourse
with a kindred spirit, when in reality he was quite alone. But the man
wrote novels, and withal believed in them at the time of writing. It
was true that on one occasion, when the Steels came to tea, the novelist
walked his garden with the self-same radiant face with which he had
lately taken to walking it alone; but that also was natural enough.

The change came on the very day he finished his book, when Langholm made
himself presentable and rode off to the garden-party at Hornby Manor in
spirits worthy of the occasion. About seven of the same evening he
dismounted heavily in the by-lane outside the cottage, and pushed his
machine through the wicket, a different man. A detail declared his
depression to the woman next door, who was preparing him a more
substantial meal than Langholm ever thought of ordering for himself: he
went straight through to his roses without changing his party coat for
the out-at-elbow Norfolk jacket in which he had spent