o had told his story, finding them, to his dismay, unexpectedly
crude and unlifelike. And the story itself. Was unhappiness so necessary,
after all? They suddenly seemed to crumble away into insignificance,
these men and women of his creation. In their place he could almost fancy
a race of larger beings, a more extensive canvas, a more splendid, a
riper and richer vocabulary.

"Nothing that I have ever done," he sighed, "is worth talking to you
about. But if you are going to be my friend--"

"Well?"

"If you are going to be my friend," he went on, with almost inspired
conviction, "I shall write something different."

"One can rebuild," she murmured. "One can sometimes use the old pieces.
Life and chess are both like that."

"Would you help me, I wonder?" he asked impulsively.

She looked away from him, out across the steamer rail. She seemed to be
measuring with her eyes the roll of the ship as it rose and fell in the
trough of the sea.

"You are a strange person," she said. "Tell me, are you in the habit of
becoming suddenly dependent upon people?"

"Not I," he assured her. "If I were to tell you how my last ten years
have been spent, you would not believe me. You couldn't. If I were to
speak of a tearing, unutterable loneliness, if I were to speak of
poverty--not the poverty you know anything about, but the poverty of bare
walls, of coarse food and little enough of it, of everything cheap and
miserable and soiled and second-hand--nothing fresh, nothing
real--"

He stopped abruptly.

"But I forgot," he muttered. "I can't explain."

"Is one to understand," she asked, a little puzzled, "that you have had
difficulties in your business?"

"I have never been in business," he answered quickly. "My name is
Romilly, but I am not Romilly the manufacturer. For the last eight years
I have lived in a garret in London, teaching false art in a third-rate
school some of the time, doing penny-a-line journalistic work when I got
the chance; clerk for a month or two in a brewer's office and sacked for
incapacity--those are a few of the real threads in my life."

"At the present moment, then," she observed, "you are an impostor."

"Exactly," he admitted, "and I should probably have been repenting it by
now but for your words last night."

She smiled at him and the sun shone once more. It wasn't an ordinary
smile at all. It was just as though she were letting him into the light
of her understanding, as though some one f