"I have already said that I shall not tell you, Mr. Pounce," she answered frigidly.

He sat in silence for a little, looking extremely annoyed. Beth, to relieve the tension, offered him some more tea, which he refused curtly; but as she only smiled at the discourtesy and helped herself, he saw fit to change his mind, and then resumed the conversation.

"When Mrs. Carne heard that I was a literary man," he said with importance, "she begged me to do what I could to help you. She said it would be a great kindness; so I promised I would, and here I am."

"So it seems," said Beth.

He stared at her. "I mean it," he said.

"I don't doubt it," Beth answered. "You and Mrs. Carne are extremely kind."

"Oh, not at all!" he a.s.sured her blandly. "To me, at all events, it will be a great pleasure to help and advise you."

"How do you propose to do it?" Beth asked, relaxing. Such obtuseness was not to be taken seriously.

He glanced over his shoulder at the bureau where her papers were spread. "I shall get you to let me see some of your work," he said, "and then I can judge of its worth."

"What have you done yourself?" she asked.

"I--well, I write regularly for the _Patriarch_," he said, with the complacency of one who thinks that he need say no more. "The editor himself came to stay with us last week, and that means something. Just now, however, I am contemplating a work of fiction, an important work, if I may venture to say so myself. It has been on my mind for years."

"Indeed," said Beth. "What is its purpose?"

"Purpose!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Had you said pur-port instead of pur-pose, it would have been a sensible question. It is hardly likely I shall write a novel with a purpose. I leave that to the ladies."

"I have read somewhere that Milton said the poet's mission was '_to allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affections in right tune_,'--is not that a purpose?" Beth asked. "And one in our own day has talked of '_that great social duty to impart what we believe and what we think we have learned. Among the few things of which we can p.r.o.nounce ourselves certain is the obligation of inquirers after truth to communicate what they obtain._'"

"But not in the form of fiction," Alfred Cayley Pounce put in dogmatically.

"Yet there is always purpose in the best work of the great writers of fiction," Beth maintained.

Not being able to deny this, he supposed sarcastically that she had read all the works to which she alluded.

"I see you suspect that I have not," she answered, smiling.

"I suspect you did not find that pa.s.sage you quoted just now from Milton in his works," he rejoined.

"I said as much," she reminded him.

"Well, but you ought to know better than to quote an author you have not read," he informed her.

"Do you mean that I should read all a man's works before I presume to quote a single pa.s.sage?"

"I do," he replied. "Women never understand thoroughness," he observed, largely.

"Some of us see a difference between thoroughness and niggling," Beth answered. "I should say, beware of endless preparation! We have heard of Mr. Casaubon and _The Key to all Mythologies_."

"I understand now what your friend Mrs. Carne meant about the manner in which you take advice," Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce informed her, in a slightly offended tone.

Beth, wondering inwardly why so many people a.s.sume they are competent to advise, prayed that she herself might always be modest enough to wait at least until her advice was asked.

"I hope I have not discussed your opinion impolitely," she said. "Pray excuse me if you think I have."

Mollified, he turned his attention once more to the littered bureau.

"You have a goodly pile of ma.n.u.script there," he remarked; "may I ask what it is?"

"It is a little book into which I am putting all my ignorance," she said.

"I hope you are not going to be diffident about letting me see it?" he answered encouragingly. "I could certainly give you some useful hints."

"You are too kind," she said; and he accepted the a.s.sertion without a suspicion of sarcasm. She rose when she had spoken, drew the lid of the bureau down over her papers, and locked it deliberately; but the precaution rather flattered him than otherwise.

"You need not be afraid," he said. "I promise to be lenient. And if we are as fast friends when the book appears as I trust we shall be, the _Patriarch_ itself shall proclaim its merits; if not----"

"I suppose it will discover my faults," Beth put in demurely. "I wonder, by the way," she added, "who told you you are so much cleverer than I am?"

But fortunately Mrs. Kilroy came in and interrupted them before he had had time to grasp the remark, for which Beth, from whom it had slipped unawares, was devoutly thankful.

When he had gone, she sat and wondered if she had really understood him aright with regard to the _Patriarch_. Certainly he had seemed to threaten her, but it was hard to believe that he had sunk so low as to be capable of criticising her work, not on its own merits, but with regard to the terms he should be on with its author. She was too upright herself, however, to think such dishonest meanness possible, so she put the suspicion far from her, and tried to find some charitable explanation of the several signs of paltriness she had already detected, and to think of him as he had seemed to her in the old days, when she had endowed him with all the qualities she herself had brought into their acquaintance to make it pleasant and of good effect.

Beth had taken to rambling about alone in the quiet streets and squares for exercise; and as she returned a few days later from one of these rambles, she encountered Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce coming out of a florist's with a large bouquet of orchids in his hand.

"You see I do not forget you," he said, holding the bouquet out to her. "Every lady has her flower. These delicate orchids are for you."

But Beth ignored the offering. "You are still fond of flowers then?"

slipped from her.

"We do not leave a taste for flowers behind us with our toys," he rejoined. "If we like flowers as children, we love them as men. The taste develops like a talent when we cultivate it. To love flowers with true appreciation of their affinities in regard to certain persons, is an endowment, a grace of nature which bespeaks the most absolute refinement of mind. And what would life be without refinement of mind!"

Beth had walked on, and he was walking beside her.

"And how does the book progress?" he inquired.

"It is finished," she answered.

"What! already?" he exclaimed. "Why, it takes _me_ a week to write five hundred words. But then, of course, my work is highly concentrated. I have sent home for some of it to show you. You see I am pertinacious. I said I would help you, and I will. I hope you will live to be glad that we have met. But you must not write at such a rate. You can only produce poor thin stuff in that way."

Beth shrugged her shoulders, and let him a.s.sume what he liked on the subject.

They walked on a little way in silence, then he began again about the flowers. "Flowers," he informed her, "were the great solace of my boyhood--the sole solace, I may say, for I had no friends, no companions, except a poor little chap, a cripple, on whom I took pity.

My people did not think me strong enough for a public school, so they sent me to a private tutor, a man of excellent family, Rector of a large seaside parish in the north. He only took me as a favour; he had no other pupils. But it was very lonely in that great empty house. And the seash.o.r.e, although it filled my mind with poetry, was desolate, desolate!"

Beth, as she listened to these meanderings of his fancy, and recalled old Vicar Richardson and the house full of children, thought of Mr.

Pounce's remarks about feminine accuracy.

"But had you no girl-friend?" she asked.