independence, what assured, what perfect conditions! Oh for a lone
isle in a tepid sea!"

"Isn't this practically a lone isle, and aren't you, as an
encircling medium, tepid enough?" he asked, alluding with a laugh

to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his
little provincial home. "Time isn't what I've lacked hitherto:

the question hasn't been to find it, but to use it. Of course my
illness made, while it lasted, a great hole - but I dare say there

would have been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has more
pockets than a billiard-table. The great thing is now to keep on

my feet."
"That's exactly what I mean."

Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes - such pleasant eyes as he had
- in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a

dim imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his
illness had been cruel, his convalescence slow. "It isn't as if I

weren't all right."
"Oh if you weren't all right I wouldn't look at you!" I tenderly

said.
We had both got up, quickened as by this clearer air, and he had

lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, which with an
intenser smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he applied to

the flame of his match. "If I weren't better I shouldn't have
thought of THAT!" He flourished his script in his hand.

"I don't want to be discouraging, but that's not true," I returned.
"I'm sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had

visitations sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think
of more and more all the while. That's what makes you, if you'll

pardon my familiarity, so respectable. At a time when so many
people are spent you come into your second wind. But, thank God,

all the same, you're better! Thank God, too, you're not, as you
were telling me yesterday, 'successful.' If YOU weren't a failure

what would be the use of trying? That's my one reserve on the
subject of your recovery - that it makes you 'score,' as the

newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost
anything that does that's horrible. 'We are happy to announce that

Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of
excellent health.' Somehow I shouldn't like to see it."

"You won't see it; I'm not in the least celebrated - my obscurity
protects me. But couldn't you bear even to see I was dying or

dead?" my host enquired.
"Dead - passe encore; there's nothing so safe. One never knows

what a living artist may do - one has mourned so many. However,
one must make the worst of it. You must be as dead as you can."

"Don't I meet that condition in having just published a book?"
"Adequately, let us hope; for the book's verily a masterpiece."

At this moment the parlour-maid appeared in the door that opened
from the garden: Paraday lived at no great cost, and the frisk of

petticoats, with a timorous "Sherry, sir?" was about his modest
mahogany. He allowed half his income to his wife, from whom he had

succeeded in separating without redundancy of legend. I had a
general faith in his having behaved well, and I had once, in

London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to dinner. He now turned to speak
to the maid, who offered him, on a tray, some card or note, while,

agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of the precinct. The idea
of his security became supremely dear to me, and I asked myself if

I were the same young man who had come down a few days before to
scatter him to the four winds. When I retraced my steps he had

gone into the house, and the woman - the second London post had
come in - had placed my letters and a newspaper on a bench. I sat

down there to the letters, which were a brief business, and then,
without heeding the address, took the paper from its envelope. It

was the journal of highest renown, THE EMPIRE of that morning. It
regularly came to Paraday, but I remembered that neither of us had

yet looked at the copy already delivered. This one had a great
mark on the "editorial" page, and, uncrumpling the wrapper, I saw

it to be directed to my host and stamped with the name of his
publishers. I instantly divined that THE EMPIRE had spoken of him,

and I've not forgotten the odd little shock of the circumstance.
It checked all eagerness and made me drop the paper a moment. As I

sat there conscious of a palpitation I think I had a vision of what
was to be. I had also a vision of the letter I would presently

address to Mr. Pinhorn, breaking, as it were, with Mr. Pinhorn. Of
course, however, the next minute the voice of THE EMPIRE was in my

ears.
The article wasn't, I thanked heaven, a review; it was a "leader,"

the last of three, presenting Neil Paraday to the human race. His
new book, the fifth from his hand, had been but a day or two out,

and THE EMPIRE, already aware of it, fired, as if on the birth of a
prince, a salute of a whole column. The guns had been booming

these three hours in the house without our suspecting them. The
big blundering newspaper had discovered him, and now he was

proclaimed and anointed and crowned. His place was assigned him as
publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had pointed to the topmost

chair; he was to pass up and still up, higher and higher, between
the watching faces and the envious sounds - away up to the dais and

the throne. The article was "epoch-making," a landmark in his
life; he had taken rank at a bound, waked up a national glory. A

national glory was needed, and it was an immenseconvenience he was
there. What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a

little faint - it meant so much more than I could say "yea" to on
the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous

wave I speak of had swept something away. It had knocked down, I
suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my

flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast
and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would

come out a contemporary. That was what had happened: the poor man
was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been

overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A
little more and he would have dipped down the short cut to

posterity and escaped.
CHAPTER IV.

WHEN he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for
beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save

that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom
at a second glance I recognised the highest contemporary

enterprise.
"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather

white: "he wants to publish heaven knows what about me."
I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had

wanted. "Already?" I cried with a sort of sense that my friend had
fled to me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested
the electric headlights of some monstrous modem ship, and I felt as

if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw his
momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the

first in the field. A great interest is naturally felt in Mr.
Paraday's surroundings," he heavily observed.

"I hadn't the least idea of it," said Paraday, as if he had been
told he had been snoring.

"I find he hasn't read the article in THE EMPIRE," Mr. Morrow
remarked to me. "That's so very interesting - it's something to

start with," he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which
were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little

garden. As a "surrounding" I felt how I myself had already been
taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. "I

represent," our visitor continued, "a syndicate of influential
journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public - whose publics,

I may say - are in peculiarsympathy with Mr. Paraday's line of
thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views

on the subject of the art he so nobly exemplifies. In addition to