“Who writes the Warden, Kit?”

She asked it on the Sat­urday, over the break­fast things, in the voice in which she asked him whether it was likely to rain; and Kit, who was read­ing the Chron­icle against the cof­fee-pot be­cause Mr. Pel­ham did not want it until ten, said that nobody knew, and that Pel­ham said Albe­marle Street kept it for reas­ons, and that if she wanted his opin­ion it was one of the Rad­cliffes, since nobody else would print it.

“I did not want your opin­ion. I wanted Mr. Pel­ham’s.”

“Then you shall have it on Monday, from Hare Court.” He turned the paper. “Here is a thing, though. There is to be a new maga­zine in the Row after Christ­mas. Bald­win’s are at the back of it, Pel­ham says, and the first num­ber is to be out in Janu­ary, and they are buy­ing up every­body. Pel­ham had it at Dick’s. They have writ­ten to half the writ­ing men in Lon­don, and they have writ­ten”⁠—he found the place he wanted in the Chron­icle, and lost in­terest in his own sen­tence⁠—“to the Author of the Mor­timers, through Bal­dock, and the Row says Bal­dock has not sent it on, be­cause he has not the dir­ec­tion. Nobody has the dir­ec­tion. Pass the but­ter, Clem.”

Clem­ency passed the but­ter.

“Have they,” she said.

*  *  *  *  *

The Temple in the long va­ca­tion is a place in which a ru­mour has noth­ing to do but grow.

The courts do not sit. The bench­ers are in the coun­try; the ju­ni­ors who can af­ford it are on cir­cuit, and the ju­ni­ors who can­not are in their cham­bers with the door shut, pre­tend­ing to be. The laundresses have the stair­cases to them­selves. A man may walk from the Inner Temple gate to the river at noon and meet nobody but a porter and a cat, and the porter will tell him any­thing he likes, be­cause noth­ing has

happened since July and the porter is in want of con­ver­sa­tion. It was in this hush, in the first week of Oc­to­ber, be­tween the Michael­mas rents and the Michael­mas term, which did not begin until No­vem­ber and had noth­ing to do with Michael­mas but the name, that the Inner Temple made up its mind who wrote The Lord Warden.

Mr. Kin­ross, who had walked there every day for a month, was not con­sul­ted.

He was in his cham­bers, with the door shut, not pre­tend­ing to be any­thing. He had brought with him the six num­bers of the Mor­timers and the el­even num­bers of the Warden, and a pen­cil, and the in­ten­tion of read­ing the two of them through to­gether, in order, as one reads two sides of a cor­res­pond­ence when one has begun to sus­pect that the other side has been read­ing it more care­fully than one­self. He had done this on the Monday, and again on the Tues­day, and by the Tues­day af­ter­noon he had begun to sort his own mar­gins, which was a thing he had never done, be­cause he had never be­fore had mar­gins worth sort­ing.

They sor­ted into two heaps. In the one heap were the cor­rec­tions: the rail­ings, the din­ner-hour, a car­riage that would not have stood where the Author had stood it, a quo­ta­tion from the Psalms in the Bible words, which no cler­gy­man had ever read from a desk, since the church reads them from the Prayer-Book. They were the marks of a man who knew the front of a house. In the other heap were the things he had let stand, and had marked only with a tick, or with true, or with noth­ing; and he ob­served, with the de­tach­ment of a man cata­loguing some­body else’s lib­rary, that every one of them was a thing seen from the back of the house: what a foot­man cost, and what a cook would bear, and how a house­keeper kept her book, and what it was to sit out a din­ner in a gown. The Author had been let into every room in Mount Street but the draw­ing-room, and had de­scribed the draw­ing-room from the stairs.

A house­keeper’s son. He wrote it on a slip, and under it Oxford, with a query, and under that, be­cause he was hon­est in a mar­gin if nowhere else, pos­sibly a woman; and he looked at the three lines for a while, and then struck out the third. A woman could not have kept it up for six months, at seven guineas, to the tenth of every month. Women did not write to the tenth of the month. They wrote when they were un­happy, and stopped when they were mar­ried, and in either con­di­tion they did not know what a foot­man cost; it was a thing they were kept from know­ing, as they were kept from the area steps. He had the testi­mony of his aunt, who had kept house for

him for el­even years and had never in that time named a sum under ten thou­sand pounds. The house­keeper’s son was a bet­ter an­swer. It ac­coun­ted for the stairs. He put the slip in the drawer with the oth­ers, and was pleased with it, as a man is pleased with a wrong an­swer that has cost him some trouble.

*  *  *  *  *

She went on the Tues­day, be­cause Tues­day was the day on which Mrs. Lyd­iard went to Bread Street to see about the Hind­leys’ ac­count, which had been seen about every Tues­day for two years and would not be settled in Clem­ency’s life­time; and be­cause a woman who is going to walk two miles west­ward through Lon­don with no par­cel had bet­ter choose a day on which nobody will ask her where she is going.

She had settled, in the night, how it was to be done. One did not walk down Mount Street. One walked through it, on the way to some­where else, with the air of a per­son who had been sent; and the some­where else was Gros­venor Square, be­cause a woman in a grey gown turned once might be any­body’s gov­erness going any­where, so long as she did not stop. The whole art, as Clem­ency un­der­stood it, lay in not stop­ping. She had been not stop­ping out­side Bal­dock’s win­dow on the first of every month for six months, and con­sidered her­self a pro­fi­cient.

She stopped at Acker­mann’s.

She had not meant to. It was on the way, which was her ex­cuse, and it was a win­dow into which half Lon­don looked, which was her other ex­cuse, and she had crossed the Strand on pur­pose to be on its side of the street, which was no ex­cuse at all. There were the new prints, and the draw­ing-books, and the little boxes of col­ours in their rows, and a card with the price of a cake of col­our writ­ten on it in a clerk’s hand; and she stood and read the card twice, as she had read Mr. Wray twice, and found it as clever and as much to the point. She knew to a penny what she had in her retic­ule, and to a penny what the week wanted of it, and the dif­fer­ence be­tween the two sums was ex­actly one cake of col­our, or a little over; it had been so for a month, and she had not spent it, be­cause to spend it on a col­our would be to begin a pic­ture, and she had begun enough of those.

Three doors along there was a hab­er­dasher’s, with a rib­bon in the win­dow of a blue that Lucy had been want­ing since the sum­mer for a straw hat that did not de­serve it. Clem­ency went in and bought a yard and a half of it, and put the par­cel in her retic­ule, where it took up the room of the cake of col­our pre­cisely; and came out, and did not look again at Acker­mann’s, and walked on to­ward Char­ing Cross, and found, with some sur­prise, that she

was not sorry. She would say noth­ing about it. She would leave it on Lucy’s pil­low and let her think it had come from Kit, who would take the credit, as he took the credit for most things, and in this case would de­serve it rather less than usual.

It was a long way. She had never walked it. Pic­ca­dilly she knew as far as the cir­cu­lat­ing lib­rary; bey­ond it the street went up, and the houses went up with it, and the shops stopped, and the pave­ment grew wider and emp­tier and cleaner, as though the dirt had been told it was not wanted and had gone away east. She turned up by the corner that she had chosen from a map in Dun­ning’s shop, and came, by two turn­ings that she had made in her head a hun­dred times and never on her feet, into Mount Street.

It was not el­eg­ant.

She had known that it would not be; she had writ­ten that it was not; she had taken some pains, in the second num­ber, to make Mrs. Mor­timer say so. But she had not known how it was not. It was not el­eg­ant as Bread Street was not el­eg­ant: it had a pub­lic-house in it, and a work­house, and a smell of some­thing being boiled, and a cart; and the houses were brown and nar­row and had the air of houses that were let, and would be let again, to people who had taken them be­cause they were within a street of the Square and would not be within a street of it long. She walked down it slowly, with no par­cel, and nobody asked her any­thing at all; and she thought, as she went, that she had been very nearly right about everything in it ex­cept its size, which was smal­ler, and its noise, which was greater, and its rail­ings, which were not at the kerb; and that she would not have changed a sen­tence of the six num­bers for hav­ing seen it, and that she would not now, for any money, write the sev­enth with­out hav­ing done so.

Then she came out into the Square, and lost her nerve.

It was not the houses. She had ex­pec­ted the houses. It was the quiet. Noth­ing in the Square was mak­ing a noise: not the garden, which was locked; not the car­riages, which stood with their wheels muffled in straw where some­body was ill; not the ser­vants, who went along the areas under the pave­ment as though the pave­ment were a roof; not the pave­ment it­self, which was wide enough for four people and had nobody on it. She stood at the corner with her hand on the rail­ings of a house, which were, as Kit had said, along the area, to keep her from fall­ing into the kit­chen; and she un­der­stood for the first time what Mr. Wray had meant, and that he had been kinder than he knew. One could not de­scribe this from the wrong side of the rail­

­ings. One could not de­scribe it from the right side either. It did not want de­scrib­ing. It wanted leav­ing alone, which was what it had, and what it had been built for, and what nobody in Bread Street or Salis­bury Square had ever been able to af­ford.

She had meant to walk once round and go home. She had got as far as the north side when a win­dow went up, as a win­dow had gone up over her head in the Row the week be­fore, ex­cept that this one went up under her feet, and a voice said: “You’ll be the young per­son about the place.”

Clem­ency looked down into the area of a house in Gros­venor Square, which was his, though she did not know it and there was noth­ing on the house to say so; and a woman in a cap looked up at her out of it, with her sleeves rolled, and the whole of her face ar­ranged into the ques­tion of whether this one would do.

“I beg your par­don?”

“Kit­chen-maid. You’ll have come from the of­fice. Come down, then; you’ll not get the place from the pave­ment.”

She went down. There were el­even steps, and the rail­ings were at her shoulder all the way, and the kit­chen door stood open at the bot­tom of them with the warmth com­ing out of it like a breath; and she did not, at any one of the el­even steps, say that she was not come about the place, be­cause at the first of them it had seemed rude to in­ter­rupt, and at the fifth it had seemed too late, and by the el­ev­enth she had dis­covered that she did not want to. She was nobody. She had been nobody in Bread Street and nobody in Salis­bury Square and nobody, with some care, in Pater­noster Row; but she had never be­fore been nobody in par­tic­u­lar, with a char­ac­ter to an­swer for and a place to be tried for, and a woman in a cap who wished to know whether she could scour.

She said that she could scour.

“And the fires?”

“And the fires.”

“You’re very fine-spoken, for the of­fice.” The cook, if it was the cook, looked at her gown. “Where were you last?”

“With a fam­ily in the City,” said Clem­ency, who had been with one for six-and-twenty years, “that has since gone down in the world.”

“They mostly have, in the City.” This was said with­out malice, as one states the cli­mate. “You’ll not get a City place here. It is a quiet house. The fam­ily’s in the north and the mas­ter dines alone, when he dines, which is not every day, and never at six, whatever you may have been used to. It’s four­teen guineas, and your tea and sugar, and you’ll find it enough, for there’s noth­ing to spend it on. The

last girl went be­cause it was too quiet. Could you bear it quiet?”

“I have borne a great deal of noise,” said Clem­ency, “and I should like to try the other.”

The woman in the cap laughed, which she had not ex­pec­ted to do, and which Clem­ency had not ex­pec­ted to make her do.

“Can you read?”

“A little.”

“Write?”

“Enough to sign for my wages.”

“Fol­low­ers?”

“None,” said Clem­ency.

“You’ll all say that.”

“I have said it for six-and-twenty years, and it has been true the whole time, which is more than most can say of any­thing.”

The cook laughed again, and said she was a cool one, and that it was no bad thing in a kit­chen-maid, for the last had cried; and for a quarter of an hour, in the warm, at the foot of the el­even steps, with her back to the coal-cel­lar and the Square going by over­head, she was asked everything that a lady could not have been asked and answered everything that a lady could not have known, and was found sat­is­fact­ory in all of it, and was told to come again on Fri­day when Mr. Fen­wick would be at home, be­cause noth­ing in that house was settled with­out Mr. Fen­wick, and it was as well she should know it from the start.

She did not say that she would come on Fri­day. She did not say that she would not. She stood at the foot of the steps and looked, be­cause she had leave to look, at the only part of Gros­venor Square that she was ever likely to see from the in­side; and what she saw was a strip of sky with rail­ings across it, and the un­der­side of the pave­ment, and a round iron plate let into it where the coals went down, and, going past above her head at the level of her eyes, boots. Boots, and the wheels of a bar­row, and the hem of a gown, and more boots. One did not see faces from the area. One saw the whole of the fash­ion­able world by its feet, and learned, in a quarter of an hour, more of where it was going than it knew it­self.

She went up the el­even steps with her hand on the rail­ings, and along the north side, and out of the Square by the way she had come, and did not run, and did not laugh aloud until she was in Mount Street, where nobody minded.

Mr. Kin­ross was at the Temple. He had been there since ten, with the door shut, sort­ing his mar­gins into the front of the house and the back; and at the hour at which a young per­son was being tried for the place in his kit­chen, and found sat­is­fact­ory, he was writ­ing a house­keeper’s son on a slip of paper two miles off, and strik­ing out the line below it.

*  *  *  *  *

Noth­ing came on the Monday, be­cause Mr. Pel­ham, who had some­thing bet­ter in hand, would not be hur­ried; and the some­thing bet­ter came home with Kit on the Thursday, at six, in the form of news.

“They have found the Warden,” said Kit, be­fore he had his coat off.

Clem­ency, who was lay­ing the cloth be­cause Lucy was doing her hair, laid a fork very ex­actly where it went.

“Found him where?”

“In Crown Office Row.” Kit sat down to the fire with the air of a man who has car­ried a thing two hun­dred yards and pro­poses to be paid for it. “It’s a Mr. Dal­gleish, a con­vey­an­cer, who has cham­bers over Grice. Pel­ham had it from Grice on Tues­day, and the whole Inn has it now; you can’t cross the garden with­out being told. He takes the Albe­marle and reads it at Dick’s to save the two shil­lings, and his clerk has seen him carry it home, which he never did be­fore this year, and he dined in hall twice last term with the Rad­cliffe that is a bencher, who is no re­la­tion to the Albe­marle Street one, which Pel­ham says is neither here nor there, and he has been pink in the face since the first of the month. It’s as plain as a pikestaff. Pel­ham says there was never a doubt of it.”

“There was never a doubt of it on Tues­day,” said Clem­ency. “There was no Mr. Dal­gleish on Sat­urday.”

“There was al­ways a Mr. Dal­gleish. There was no oc­ca­sion to think of him.”

“Who is Mr. Grice?”

“Grice? Grice is the man he has cham­bers over.”

“And how does Mr. Grice know?”

“Lord, Clem, how does any­body know any­thing? His laundress told him. She does Dal­gleish’s stairs. She had it from the clerk.” Kit stretched his feet to the fire. “If you want a thing proved, you want a laundress. They know who is at home. And I’ll tell you what else the garden knows, since you began it. I asked Pel­ham on Monday, for you, who wrote the thing, and Pel­ham asked Grice, and Grice told the garden; and the garden has it now that there is a lady in Fleet Street who reads the Warden, which the Inn finds a bet­ter joke than Dal­gleish. You’re fam­ous, Clem. You haven’t a name, but you’re fam­ous.”

“I asked you who wrote it. I did not say I read it.”

“You asked who wrote it over the break­fast things. Nobody asks that about a thing they don’t read.” He was pleased with this; it was the kind of in­fer­ence he ad­mired in Pel­ham. “It’s gone round. You’ll not get it back.”

She knew that she would not. She had asked one ques­tion, in the voice

in which she asked about the weather, and it had gone two hun­dred yards into the Temple and come out the other side as a lady in Fleet Street; and she sat with the know­ledge, which was new to her, of hav­ing star­ted a thing that she could not stop, and found that she did not like it, and that it was, as near as made no dif­fer­ence, what she had been doing to a man in Albe­marle Street since the first of Sep­tem­ber.

Clem­ency fin­ished the cloth. She knew that it was not Mr. Dal­gleish, as she knew the price of coals; it was one of the things in her head that she did not have to look for. The man who wrote the Warden did not read the Albe­marle at Dick’s to save two shil­lings. He owned it. He car­ried the Warden in it at twenty pounds a month, which was two hun­dred and forty pounds a year, which was more than Kit and Mr. Pel­ham to­gether, and more than the house in Salis­bury Square had cost her in rent since Bread Street; and he had read her fourth num­ber, and taken a sen­tence out of it and sent it back to her in the el­ev­enth, and a man who did that did not dine in hall with a bencher to be no­ticed. He had no wish to be no­ticed. He had been not no­ticed for el­even months, with the whole of Lon­don look­ing, and had paid twenty pounds a month for the priv­ilege; and the Temple had now given his book to a con­vey­an­cer who was pink in the face. She could not say so. She could not say that she knew the price of the Warden’s si­lence, or how, or why she had been count­ing it; and she said in­stead, “Is he a mar­ried man, Mr. Dal­gleish?” which was what her mother would have asked, and was given to un­der­stand that he was not, and that he had four sis­ters in Perth, and that the thing was a settled fact.

Mrs. Lyd­iard came in with the fish, and Lucy with her hair, and they sat down; and Kit, who had the floor and did not mean to give it up, went on from the Warden to the Mor­timers with the ease of a man who has two scan­dals and one audi­ence.

“And that’s not the whole of it. Pel­ham has the other one too. Pel­ham has made a study of it.” He helped him­self. “He has seven reas­ons why the Author of the Mor­timers is a City man, and he gave them me on the stairs, and I’ll give them you.”

“Must you?” said Clem­ency.

“You asked me on Sat­urday who wrote the Warden. You can hear who wrote the other. Firstly.” He held up a fork. “He knows what everything costs. A gen­tle­man doesn’t know what any­thing costs; he has a man to know it for him. Secondly: he says the Man­chester trade, and never the cot­ton trade, which is what the trade calls it­self and nobody else does. Thirdly: he has never dined in Gros­venor Square,

which Pel­ham says proves noth­ing, since neither has Pel­ham, not since the year el­even. Fourthly⁠—” He stopped. “I’ve lost the fourth. It was a good one. Some­thing about the Psalms.”

“He quotes the Psalms out of the Bible,” said Clem­ency, “as they are read at pray­ers in a count­ing-house, and not out of the Prayer-Book, as they are read in church.”

Kit stared at her. “That’s it. How did you come at it?”

“You said it was about the Psalms. There is only one thing it could be about.” She took some fish. “Go on.”

“Fifthly,” said Kit, who had not quite re­covered, “he dines at six him­self, or it would never have come into his head. That one’s mine. Sixthly: he gives the women all the sen­tences about money, which Pel­ham says no gen­tle­man would do, be­cause a gen­tle­man’s women don’t talk about money. Sev­enthly: he is paid by the sheet, and he writes to the end of the sheet ex­actly, every num­ber, like a man meas­ur­ing calico.”

“He is not paid by the sheet. Nobody in the Row is paid by the sheet. Mr. Bal­dock pays by the sheet and a half, be­cause that is what a num­ber is.”

“How the devil do you know what Bal­dock pays?”

“You told us,” said Clem­ency. “In August. You said every­body in the Row knew it.”

Kit had said it, or some­thing near enough to it that he could not be sure he had not; and he had the grace to look put out, and the sense to re­cover by tak­ing more fish. Lucy said that she did not care who wrote the Mor­timers, so long as they went on, be­cause Miss Harker had Num­ber Six and would not give it up until Sunday. Mrs. Lyd­iard said noth­ing. She had the cuff of Kit’s other shirt, and was mend­ing it with the air of a woman who does not listen to the maga­zines; and Clem­ency, who had ar­gued four of Mr. Pel­ham’s seven reas­ons with­out once stop­ping to con­sider which side of them she was on, found that she had be­come, in the course of a plate of fish, the ac­know­ledged au­thor­ity at that table on the Author of The Mor­timers of Mount Street, and that she was be­lieved in everything she said be­cause nobody present could ima­gine that she had any means of know­ing. It was a very com­fort­able po­s­i­tion. It was the most com­fort­able po­s­i­tion she had oc­cu­pied in a month. She cor­rec­ted Kit twice more be­fore the cheese, on the num­ber of the Mor­timers’ ser­vants and the quarter in which they had taken the house, and was right both times, and was thanked.

“He writes,” said Kit, sum­ming up for Mr. Pel­ham, “like a man who has had a bill to pay.”

“He writes like a man who has paid it,” said Clem­ency, and was aware, as

she said it, that she had pro­nounced upon the Author’s sex for the first time in her life, aloud, at her own table; and that it had cost her noth­ing, and that she had been glad to do it.

“It is a woman,” said Mrs. Lyd­iard.

She said it to the cuff. The table looked at her.

“Mama!”

“I have said it be­fore. Nobody listens.” Mrs. Lyd­iard drew her thread through. “There is no man alive knows what it costs to turn a gown. It is in the fourth num­ber. He knows to a shil­ling. It is a woman, and she has had to do it.”

Kit laughed. “A woman couldn’t keep a thing up six months, Ma’am. Not to the tenth of the month, not for money. They keep noth­ing up six months but a griev­ance.”

Lucy laughed, be­cause Kit had. Clem­ency laughed too. It was the only laugh of hers at that table in a month that cost her any­thing, and she paid it, and went on with the cheese; and her mother, who had not laughed, bit off her thread and said that she would say no more about it, and did not look at her elder daugh­ter at all, which was either noth­ing or was a great deal, and Clem­ency had no means of know­ing which, and did not ask.

“Well, who­ever he is,” said Kit, “he’s going up in the world. He’s to leave Bal­dock. The Row has it from Bald­win’s people that the Mor­timers are be­spoke for the new maga­zine, the first num­ber, in Janu­ary, at ten guineas; and that the Author has been ap­plied to, and has dined with them.”

“Dined with them,” said Clem­ency.

“At the Chapter, on Tues­day. A tall man, the Row’s man says, about forty, with a Lan­ca­shire voice, who talked of noth­ing all din­ner but the price of calico. Which bears out the second reason, you’ll ob­serve.” Kit was pleased with this. “And the sev­enth.”

“On Tues­day.”

“On Tues­day.”

Clem­ency had been, on Tues­day, at the foot of el­even steps in Gros­venor Square, being asked whether she could scour. She sat and con­sidered the tall man with the Lan­ca­shire voice, who had dined at the Chapter in her name and talked of calico. She found that she did not re­sent him. She found, which sur­prised her more, that she rather ad­mired him, as one ad­mires a thing well done; for he was, in every point, the Author that Mr. Pel­ham had built out of seven reas­ons and that her brother had just fin­ished prov­ing to her over the fish, and he had had the wit to go and be him be­fore any­body else thought of it. The town had wanted a Man­chester man of forty, and had got one. It would al­ways get one. She had un­der­stood that even­ing some­thing that Mr. Bal­dock, with thirty

years in the trade, could have told her in a sen­tence: that the Author of any­thing is not the per­son who wrote it but the per­son the town has agreed upon, and that the town will dine him at the Chapter whether he ex­ists or not.

Kit, over the cheese, made a couplet upon it. He made couplets when he had drunk his share, and this one came out whole, as his couplets did, and was bet­ter than most:

He was so pleased with it that he said it twice; and he took it into the Temple on Fri­day, and said it to Grice on the stairs, and by Sat­urday noon it was going round the Inn as Mr. Wray’s.

Lucy cleared. She was in and out with the plates, and had not been at­tend­ing, or had seemed not to; and she stopped by Clem­ency’s chair with the cheese-dish in her hands and said, in the voice in which she said most things, which was the voice of a girl who has been told she is pretty and has found it a suf­fi­cient oc­cu­pa­tion: “I could have told him where the rail­ings go. I fell down an area in Fet­ter Lane when I was nine, and Papa said it was the rail­ings’ fault for being where they were, and the man said that was where rail­ings went, and they had words. I have never for­got it. I have a mark.”

“You never said so,” said Clem­ency.

“Nobody asked me,” said Lucy, and went out with the cheese.

*  *  *  *  *

She wrote the sev­enth num­ber on the Fri­day, in the back room, by day­light, in one sit­ting.

It was the kit­chen-maid’s num­ber. It had to be; there was no other way, now, that she could write the house. Mr. Mor­timer had lost his foot­man in the fifth and his peace in the sixth, and in the sev­enth the thing that happened was that noth­ing happened, and that a girl of fif­teen, newly come from a regis­ter-of­fice with her char­ac­ter in her pocket, stood at the foot of the area steps in Mount Street and looked up; and Clem­ency, who had never in six num­bers been able to see the house from the in­side, found that she could see the whole of it from below, down to the plate where the coals went in. She put in the plate. She put in the boots. She put in a cook who stated the cli­mate of the City with­out malice, and a quarter of an hour in the warm, and four­teen guineas and the tea and sugar; and when she came to the car­riage, which in the fourth num­ber had drawn up at the rail­ings at the kerb, she drew it up where car­riages drew up in that Square, at a step, with the rail­ings be­hind it along the area and

the kit­chen-maid under them, and went on with­out re­mark­ing it, as a woman mends a cuff.

Then she wrote the sen­tence.

She had not planned it. It ar­rived, as the good ones did, in the middle of a para­graph about some­thing else, and she stopped and let it come:

She read it over. It was true. It was the first thing in seven num­bers that she had known to be true be­cause she had stood in the place, and not be­cause she had taken trouble; and she sat for a mo­ment with the pen in her hand, and did a sum that she had not meant to do, and found that four­teen guineas was two num­bers of the Mor­timers ex­actly, with noth­ing over, and that she had there­fore been paid, that sum­mer, for every pair of months, a kit­chen-maid’s year. She did not know what to make of this. She wrote it down on the back of the sheet, as she wrote down most things she did not know what to make of, and went on with the num­ber, and fin­ished it at four, when the light went, with the sev­enth num­ber done and two days in hand, which had never happened be­fore either.

*  *  *  *  *

She took it to the Row on the Sat­urday, be­cause the tenth was a Sunday and Mr. Bal­dock, who was a Whig, kept the Sab­bath as he kept everything else, on prin­ciple and under protest.

He had two let­ters for her. He had them on the desk in front of him, squared with its edge, and he had the look of a man who has been wait­ing since break­fast to give some­body some­thing and has not yet de­cided in what order.

“This one first,” he said, “be­cause it is the one I un­der­stand.”

It was a let­ter from Lord Ash­combe. It was ad­dressed to Mr. Bal­dock, and it was three sides, in a large hand that went up­hill, and it said, in the char­ac­ter of a man who had lived in Gros­venor Square for forty years and knew what he was talk­ing about, that the Author of the Mor­timers was the first writer since Richard­son who had un­der­stood the Square; that the rail­ings in the fourth num­ber were set ex­actly where rail­ings were set in the Square, which was at the kerb, as any res­id­ent could testify; that Mr. Wray of the Albe­marle, who had said oth­er­wise, was a puppy and had never been asked any­where; and that his lord­ship had

taken the liberty of send­ing to the Row for the six num­bers, and had had them read to him, and had found the foot­man the finest thing since Richard­son, and wished Mr. Bal­dock to tell the Author so, and to tell him also that his lord­ship was his ser­vant and his ad­mirer, and would be glad to be al­lowed to be his host.

“He is wrong about the rail­ings,” said Clem­ency.

“He is a lord,” said Mr. Bal­dock. “He is al­lowed to be wrong about the rail­ings. He is not al­lowed to be wrong about them in my maga­zine, and I have no in­ten­tion of print­ing him.” He took off his spec­tacles. “The sev­enth is in your hand, I think. Have you men­ded them?”

“I have men­ded them.”

“Then they are men­ded, and his lord­ship may find it out for him­self, in a month, from the pave­ment.” He held out his hand for the num­ber, and she gave it him, and he weighed it with­out open­ing it, as he al­ways did, as though it were sold by the pound. “Fif­teen pages. You are early. You are never early.”

“I had two days in hand.”

“Nobody has two days in hand.” He put it in the drawer. “Now the other.”

The other was not ad­dressed to Mr. Bal­dock. It was ad­dressed, in a clerk’s good round hand, To the Author of “The Mor­timers of Mount Street”, to the care of Mr. Bal­dock, Pater­noster Row; and it was sealed, and Mr. Bal­dock had not broken the seal, and said so, and added that he had held it up to the win­dow on Thursday night and read it through the paper, which was not the same thing, and which he would thank her not to men­tion in the Row.

“It is from the new people,” he said. “The Lon­don, they are to call it, as if there had never been one. Bald­win’s are find­ing the money and a gen­tle­man from the news­pa­pers is to find the rest, and they are look­ing, I hear, for a man who knows the trade, which in the Row means a man who knows what every­body else is paid. They want you for the first num­ber, in Janu­ary, at ten guineas, and they want to know your name; and they are not the only ones who want to know it, for the Row has been in here twice since Tues­day to ask me whether it is true you have dined with them, and I have said that I could not un­der­take to say, which has been taken, I find, as mean­ing yes.”

“I was not at the Chapter on Tues­day.”

“I did not sup­pose you were. I sup­posed you were some­where, and that it was no busi­ness of mine.” He looked at her over the desk. “I will not keep you from ten guineas, Miss Lyd­iard. I could not, if I would, and after my lease I am not sure that I would. But I will tell you

what I told the Row, which is that I do not know the Author’s name; and I will tell you what I did not tell the Row, which is that if I did, I do not think it would fetch ten guineas in Janu­ary, nor seven, nor five. They want a Man­chester man of forty. They have dined one.”

She took the let­ter. She did not open it there. She had never had a let­ter ad­dressed to the Author be­fore; nobody had, be­cause the Author had not had a dir­ec­tion until Thursday, when the Row gave him one by ac­clam­a­tion; and she car­ried it home un­opened, with his lord­ship’s three sides fol­ded in­side it, down Lud­gate Hill and into Salis­bury Court and up the two pair of stairs, and put the two of them into the fus­tian port­fo­lio under the bed, be­tween Mr. Mor­timer with­out a face and Mrs. Mor­timer’s car­riage at the rail­ings at the kerb. It was where she kept the things she could not fin­ish. A din­ner in Gros­venor Square, and ten guineas a num­ber, and a name: they went in with the rest, and she tied the tapes.

She had let the rail­ings stand cor­rec­ted. She did not think about it. She had been a day writ­ing the sev­enth num­ber and an af­ter­noon in Gros­venor Square, and she had put the rail­ings where they were be­cause that was where they were; and if the one man in Lon­don who had taken her side in print was to find out in a month, from his own pave­ment, that she had not taken his, she was sorry for it, and would have done it again. It is the con­di­tion which in other people is called prin­ciple, and which Mrs. Lyd­iard, had she been told of it, would have called tak­ing trouble.

*  *  *  *  *

The Inner Temple gave The Lord Warden to Mr. Dal­gleish on the Tues­day, had settled it by the Thursday, and had de­livered it, with the title, by Sat­urday noon to every­body in the Inn but the one man it con­cerned.

Mr. Kin­ross was the last to be told, be­cause he spoke to nobody, and he learned of it from Fig­gis. He had walked in at the gate as he did every morn­ing, and Fig­gis the porter, who had told him noth­ing in el­even years but the weather, told him that they had found out who wrote that thing in the Albe­marle, and it was Mr. Dal­gleish of Crown Office Row, and would he credit it; and Mr. Kin­ross said that he would not, and walked on, and found that the Inn had been fur­nished overnight, as a house is fur­nished for a sale, with a single sub­ject.

He fol­lowed it, as a man who has eaten the din­ners fol­lows a point of law, to its source, which was a laundress; and found that on the evid­ence of a clerk, a bencher named Rad­cliffe who was no re­la­tion to the pub­lisher named Rad­cliffe, which the Inn

did not hold against the reas­on­ing, and the two shil­lings a month that Dal­gleish saved at Dick’s, the Inner Temple had con­victed a man of au­thor­ship on the evid­ence of his thrift. There was no break­ing it. It was not a good ar­gu­ment. It was a Temple ar­gu­ment, and he had heard worse of them win.

Grice him­self, met in the garden, im­proved on it. “And then there is the Row,” said Grice, who was a wit when the courts were up and could not help it. “Crown Office Row, sir. Called after an of­fice which nobody in it could now have poin­ted to, and the only cham­bers in the Inn with the Crown in their dir­ec­tion. The Lord Warden, you ob­serve. A Crown ap­point­ment. The thing proves it­self.” He was de­lighted. “The beauty of it is that Dal­gleish is a con­vey­an­cer. He has con­veyed noth­ing in his life but titles, and now the Inn has con­veyed one to him with­out a deed. I call it ad­verse pos­ses­sion. He has sat on the Warden twelve months with­out ob­jec­tion from the true owner, and by Black­stone it is his.”

Mr. Kin­ross, who had the deed, in a drawer in Albe­marle Street, in a hand that Mr. Rad­cliffe had last seen at the foot of a part­ner­ship, said that it was very good, and that he must tell it to some­body; and went up to his cham­bers and shut the door, and sat down, and dis­covered that what he felt was not what he had ex­pec­ted to feel.

He had ex­pec­ted to be af­fron­ted. He had been af­fron­ted, for about the length of the garden. A man does not spend el­even months and two hun­dred and twenty pounds on a book, and write the best sen­tence of his life for it in the spring, and watch it car­ried off in Oc­to­ber by a con­vey­an­cer with four sis­ters in Perth, with­out some sen­sa­tion; and the sen­sa­tion was there, and was sharp, and las­ted as far as the stair­case. What suc­ceeded it was re­lief. It was so com­plete, and so un­looked for, and so very far from cred­it­able, that he sat and ex­amined it for some time, as he would have ex­amined a clause he sus­pec­ted of being too good. The town had read his book at last, and talked of it, and given it away; and the man it had given it to was a man he had never spoken to, and never need; and the Warden was now, as far as the Inner Temple was con­cerned, a thing that had been settled, and settled wrong, and could be left alone. Nobody would look fur­ther. Nobody ever did, once a thing was settled; it was the whole prin­ciple of the law, and he had eaten the din­ners. He was free of it. He was as free as a man is who has been robbed of a thing he could not have car­ried, and he did not like it in him­self, and he found, on the Sat­urday, that there was noth­ing in the Temple that he could do about it but go home.

There was a note on the hall table. It was from Lord Ash­combe, and it went up­hill, and it said that Ash­combe had been kept in town by the build­ers, who were in at Ash­combe and would be in at Ash­combe until the Greek Kal­ends, which he laid to the ac­count of the Gov­ern­ment; that he was a neigh­bour, and sol­it­ary, and dined on Wed­nes­day; that he had se­cured, by a stroke of great good for­tune, the com­pany of a gen­tle­man from the Temple whom Kin­ross would be glad to meet, since Kin­ross was a Temple man and a reader; and that he would not say more, be­cause it was not his secret, but Kin­ross might take it that the Warden would be at the table. Fen­wick had put it under the toast-rack, which was where Mr. Kin­ross put let­ters he did not mean to an­swer; and Mr. Kin­ross took it out, and read it twice, and answered it.

*  *  *  *  *

Lord Ash­combe’s house was four doors along the north side, and he had lived in it for forty years with­out once hav­ing oc­ca­sion to no­tice the pave­ment, which was handed to him from his car­riage in the form of a step and taken away again when he had done with it. He was a large, kind, florid man of sev­enty, with a fine lib­rary in the coun­try that had been read for him by three gen­er­a­tions of chap­lains, and an opin­ion on everything in it; and he had never in his life been cor­rec­ted, be­cause there had never been any­body at his table whose busi­ness it was.

There were four at it on the Wed­nes­day: his lord­ship, Mr. Til­lot­son, who was the present chap­lain and read to him in the even­ings and had been told what to think of the Warden and thought it; Mr. Dal­gleish of Crown Office Row; and Mr. Kin­ross, who was placed op­pos­ite Mr. Dal­gleish, and was in­tro­duced to him be­fore the soup as a neigh­bour and a Temple man and a great reader of the Albe­marle, and was asked by his host, with a look, whether he had the least no­tion whom he was sit­ting across from.

Mr. Dal­gleish was a small, neat, anxious man of five-and-forty, with a stoop from the deeds and a Perth voice that he had spent twenty years in Lon­don fail­ing to lose; and he had been pink, as the Inn said, since the first of the month, and he was pink now. He said, be­fore any­one could an­swer for him, that there had been a very fool­ish re­port in the Temple which he was sorry had reached his lord­ship’s ears, and that he was a con­vey­an­cer and noth­ing else, and had never writ­ten a line in his life that was not on parch­ment.

“There!” said Lord Ash­combe. “There, Kin­ross. You see how it is. He denies it.”

“He does,” said Mr. Kin­ross.

“He has denied it to me three times since Monday. My dear sir, they all deny it. Scott has never owned Waver­ley to a liv­ing soul; they call him the Great Unknown for it; when the Regent gave his health at Carlton House as the Author of it, he drank the toast and said noth­ing, which would hang a man at the Old Bailey. And you’ll re­mem­ber the Trier­main busi­ness, when half Edin­burgh had it that Ers­kine wrote the thing, and Scott let them think so, and wrote a pre­face to help them to it. They do it for sport. It is the first mark of the thing. A man who will own to a book has gen­er­ally writ­ten a poor one.” His lord­ship was de­lighted with this, and said it again to Mr. Til­lot­son, who had heard it on Monday. “You’ll not get him to own it, Kin­ross. I have given it up. But you may take my word for it, and I have read every num­ber from the first.”

Mr. Kin­ross said: “So have I.”

It was the one true thing he could say, and he said it with some care, and found that it passed, as true things gen­er­ally do at din­ner, with­out any­body at­tend­ing to it. Mr. Dal­gleish looked at him across the table with a kind of ap­peal, as one hon­est man to an­other, and Mr. Kin­ross, who could not help him and had never be­fore in his life been un­able to help a man by telling him the truth, looked at his soup. He re­membered the Trier­main busi­ness. He re­membered, which his lord­ship did not, that Ers­kine had been asked first, and had agreed, and had writ­ten the pre­face him­self; and it came to him that he had be­come the Author of Waver­ley with­out the trouble of ar­ran­ging it, with a con­vey­an­cer for his Ers­kine, and that the only dif­fer­ence be­tween Scott’s case and his own was con­sent.

“Do you know his work?” said Lord Ash­combe.

“Every word of it.”

“Hah!” said his lord­ship, and the thing was done, and Mr. Dal­gleish sank a shade pinker and gave him­self up. “And you, Kin­ross? You never wrote any­thing your­self, I think?”

“Noth­ing with my name on it.”

“Quite right. Quite right. A gen­tle­man reads.” His lord­ship turned to the chap­lain. “Til­lot­son, the build­ers. Tell Mr. Dal­gleish about the build­ers.” And Mr. Til­lot­son told Mr. Dal­gleish about the build­ers, who were in at Ash­combe, and would be in at Ash­combe until the spring, and had been got in by the Gov­ern­ment as surely as if Lord Liver­pool had sent them down him­self; and his lord­ship, who had heard it be­fore, en­joyed it very much.

They had the siege. Mr. Kin­ross had known that they would; a man does not go to dine with Lord Ash­combe and es­cape Frois­sart. They had it with the fish, and through the fish, and his

lord­ship did the Welsh, and Mr. Til­lot­son, who had read the num­ber aloud on Tues­day and knew it bet­ter than its au­thor, sup­plied the Lady Gwen­llian; and Mr. Dal­gleish, who had begun by protest­ing and had been over­ruled and had now the air of a man who has de­cided that if he is to be hanged for a book he may as well read it, was ap­pealed to upon Shrews­bury.

“For he passed it over,” said his lord­ship. “Shrews­bury, Dal­gleish. Passed it clean over, in the tenth, the only battle in the reign that one has seen; and I say he was wrong, and Til­lot­son says he was wrong, and I’ll not be­lieve you had not a reason.”

Mr. Dal­gleish said un­hap­pily that he sup­posed the Author had thought it too well known.

“Well known! It is not well known. Nobody knows it. Til­lot­son, when was it?”

“The sum­mer of the year three, my lord.”

“The two-and-twen­ti­eth of July,” said Mr. Dal­gleish, who had been at the play, “as I have al­ways un­der­stood. And the Prince killed Percy with his own hand, which the Author might have made a great deal of.”

“He might,” said Lord Ash­combe. “He might in­deed. It is all in Frois­sart.”

Mr. Kin­ross, who knew that it was not in Frois­sart, since Frois­sart had laid down his pen three years be­fore the battle; and who knew that the day was the one-and-twen­ti­eth, since he had spent a week of the spring with it; and who knew, as every­body who had been at the play knew and every­body who had read a chron­icle did not, that nobody had ever found out who killed Percy, who had put up his visor in the press and been struck in the face by an arrow from nobody in par­tic­u­lar, and that the Prince’s hand was a poet’s: Mr. Kin­ross, who had never in two-and-thirty years let a false thing stand that he could have set right, and had not let one stand in Sep­tem­ber when it cost a young man the rail­ings, sat at Lord Ash­combe’s table with the wrong date and the wrong hand and the wrong chron­icler going round it with the fish, and looked at Mr. Dal­gleish, who could not be cor­rec­ted with­out being con­fessed, and said noth­ing at all.

He nod­ded. It was worse than say­ing it.

“You see,” said his lord­ship, to the table. “Kin­ross agrees.”

They had the Mor­timers with the mut­ton. His lord­ship had dis­covered them, it ap­peared, in the last fort­night, by way of Mr. Wray, whom he did not read but whose vic­tims he col­lec­ted, on the prin­ciple that a thing worth a paper in the Albe­marle must be worth hav­ing; and he had sent to the Row for

the six num­bers, and had had Til­lot­son read them, and had be­come their cham­pion with the whole of the en­ergy that he had formerly given to the Warden, and gave to it still. He had writ­ten to Bal­dock. He had the copy of the let­ter in his pocket, and Til­lot­son read it, up­hill, rail­ings and Richard­son and all; and Mr. Kin­ross heard his own rail­ings, which he had given to Lu­cius Wray over the port in August be­cause they were true, de­clared by a peer of forty years’ stand­ing in the Square to be ex­actly wrong, and could not say so, be­cause to say so was to say how he knew.

“The man has eyes,” said his lord­ship. “That is the whole of it. Wray has never been asked any­where, and the Author has been asked every­where, and knows where things are. And he is to leave Bal­dock, I hear, for the new thing in the Row, in Janu­ary, at ten guineas; and I have writ­ten to Bal­dock to say that if he lets him go I shall not take the Lud­gate in, which I never have, and that he had bet­ter look to it. And I have asked the Author to dine.”

“Has he answered?” said Mr. Kin­ross.

“He has not. He is a mod­est man. They are all mod­est men.” His lord­ship looked at Mr. Dal­gleish with great af­fec­tion. “Bal­dock can­not un­der­take to say who he is; it is a close thing, the Row, closer than the Temple. I have it from Til­lot­son, who has it from some­where, that he is a Man­chester man and has dined at the Chapter. Well, he shall dine here. And Dal­gleish shall dine here, and it shall be be­fore Christ­mas, and I will have the two of them at one table, the only two writers in Lon­don worth the trouble, and Wray may put that in his maga­zine. What do you say, Kin­ross? You’ll make a fourth?”

Mr. Kin­ross said that he would make a fourth.

He was sit­ting across from the wrong au­thor of the one book, and he had just been asked to meet the wrong au­thor of the other, whom he had him­self, on a slip of paper in a drawer, made a house­keeper’s son; and it came to him, as the mut­ton went round, that the whole of lit­er­ary Lon­don was at that mo­ment com­posed of people who had not writ­ten any­thing being dined by a man who had not read it, and that it was, on the whole, the best din­ner he had eaten in a year.

“It is a cold book, you know,” said Lord Ash­combe, into a pause. “The Warden. I have thought so from the first. It is a cold book writ­ten by a warm man who has nobody to be warm to; one can al­ways tell. Now Dal­gleish has four sis­ters.” He looked at Mr. Dal­gleish, and seemed for a mo­ment to be on the edge of a dis­cov­ery. “It can­not be Dal­gleish,” he said; and passed the

port, and in passing it for­got what he had said, and never found it again.

Mr. Kin­ross, who had nobody to be warm to and had been given to un­der­stand as much by his aunt in a let­ter under the toast-rack, drank his wine.

“And I will tell you an­other thing,” said his lord­ship, who had been sav­ing it. “It is ad­mired where you would not look for it. I have it⁠—never mind how I have it; Til­lot­son has it from his sis­ter, who has it from Rus­sell Square, which is as good as the City⁠—that there is a lady in the City who has read the whole of it, every num­ber, and thinks the siege the finest thing since Frois­sart. Her own words, Til­lot­son?”

“Those were the words re­por­ted to me, my lord.”

“Since Frois­sart! A lady in the City! There, Dal­gleish; there is fame. You are read in Rus­sell Square.” He was moved by it. “The finest thing since Frois­sart.”

Mr. Kin­ross had been in the room in Sep­tem­ber when Lord Ash­combe had said those words of the siege to Mr. Rad­cliffe, with­out hav­ing read it; and he heard them now come back round the whole of Lon­don, by way of Mr. Til­lot­son’s sis­ter, and be laid be­fore him as the judg­ment of a lady in the City. For the length of a swal­low he thought of the one reader he was sure of, who had taken a sen­tence out of the tenth num­ber as he had taken one out of the fourth; and then he put the thought by, since that reader was a house­keeper’s son in a cof­fee-house, and house­keep­ers’ sons are not ladies in the City. But it was a reader. It had read every num­ber, and it had praised the siege, the one thing in the book that he had put in be­cause Rad­cliffe wanted in­cid­ent, in Lord Ash­combe’s own words; and the praise had been car­ried, with the rest, to Dal­gleish’s door.

“Did she,” said Mr. Kin­ross.

It was two words, and he heard them as he said them, and it was the nearest he had come in two-and-thirty years to a joke against him­self; and nobody at the table took it for one, which was as he wished.

“Albe­marle Street,” said his lord­ship, sum­ming up, with the air of a man of the world, “has a way of not put­ting names on things, this year. One hears it of a poem. One hears it of the Warden. I dare say they know their busi­ness. But a man can­not be mod­est for ever, Dal­gleish, and I give you till Christ­mas.”

Mr. Dal­gleish said, for the fourth time, that he was a con­vey­an­cer.

“There,” said Lord Ash­combe. “You hear him.”

*  *  *  *  *

He walked home. It was four doors, and he could have been car­ried; but he walked, in the dark, along the north

side of the Square, and when he came to his own house he did a thing that he had not done in el­even years of liv­ing in it, and that Lord Ash­combe had not done in forty: he stopped on the pave­ment, and looked at it.

The door was where he had left it. The step was where the step had al­ways been, and the lamp over the fan­light, which Fen­wick kept lit until he was in; and to the left of the step, and to the right of it, at the pave­ment’s edge, with the area fall­ing away be­hind them into the dark where the kit­chen was, were the rail­ings. They were along the area. They had been along the area since the house was built. They were not at the kerb, and never had been, and no car­riage had ever drawn up at them, be­cause a car­riage drew up at the step; and he had known this. He had known it well enough to write it in a mar­gin in August with the brev­ity of a man who had never had to ex­plain him­self, and to tell it to Lu­cius Wray over the port, and to let it stand in print in Sep­tem­ber be­cause it was true. He had not known it be­cause he had looked. He had known it as Lord Ash­combe knew Frois­sart.

He stood for some time. A young per­son had stood at those rail­ings on the Tues­day of the week be­fore for a quarter of an hour, with her hand on them, and gone down; but he did not know that, and nobody had told him, and the rail­ings had noth­ing to say.

In the morn­ing he asked Fen­wick.

He asked it at break­fast, across the Chron­icle, in the tone in which he asked whether it was likely to rain, and Fen­wick, who had been el­even years in the house and had never once been asked any­thing by its mas­ter that he had not already provided, re­ceived it with the per­fect still­ness of a man who has waited a long while for some­thing and does not pro­pose to spoil it by look­ing sur­prised.

“In the area, sir,” said Fen­wick. “Along the whole front, at the pave­ment’s edge. They have been there since the house was built, under the old lord. I un­der­stood it was gen­er­ally known.”

“It is,” said Mr. Kin­ross. “Thank you, Fen­wick.”

“There was a young per­son at them on the Tues­day of last week, sir, as it hap­pens, for some little time, about the kit­chen-maid’s place. Mrs. Pratt thought her very suit­able. She did not come back.”

Mr. Kin­ross said that he was sorry to hear it, and meant the kit­chen-maid, and turned the Chron­icle; and Fen­wick re­moved the toast-rack, under which there was noth­ing, and went out.

*  *  *  *  *

They tried Car­lile at Guild­hall for four days, from the Tues­day, be­fore the Chief Justice and two spe­cial jur­ies,

for Paine first and for Palmer after him; and on the Fri­day the second jury found him guilty, as the first had done the day be­fore, and the news was in Fleet Street be­fore the court had risen, be­cause the Row had a man at the door.

It came down the street as such news did, not called but car­ried, from one shop to the next, at the pace of a man who has some­thing to tell and has not been paid to hurry: Car­lile was guilty, twice over; the At­tor­ney-Gen­eral had his ver­dicts; and every printer be­tween Temple Bar and Lud­gate who had put any­thing into type since August that he would not have cared to read aloud to a spe­cial jury went in and shut his door, and read his lease. Mr. Bal­dock heard it at two, and sat for a while, and then went down into his shop and sold a treat­ise upon the dry rot to a cler­gy­man, be­cause the trade must be kept up.

Clem­ency heard it at six, from Kit, who had it from the Inn, where it had ar­rived be­fore din­ner and been found less in­ter­est­ing than the Warden. She was mend­ing the tapes of the fus­tian port­fo­lio, which had worn, and she went on mend­ing them.

Mr. Kin­ross heard it in the Temple, at his desk, with the door shut; and he heard it, as he had heard the rest of Oc­to­ber, from Fig­gis, who put his head in with­out knock­ing, which he had never done, and said that they had found that fel­low Car­lile guilty, sir, and would he credit it, and went away.

He had the thir­teenth num­ber be­fore him. It was due in Albe­marle Street on the tenth of No­vem­ber, and he had begun it that morn­ing, which was early, for him; and he had begun it, he found, dif­fer­ently. He had taken the Warden out of Lud­low and put him on the road, in the wet, with a let­ter he had not answered; and he had taken him, for the first time in twelve num­bers, in at the back of a house in­stead of the front, and down a stair, and had let him stand in a kit­chen and be looked at by the people in it, who knew to a penny what he cost. He did not ask him­self why. He knew why, and did not pro­pose to con­sult the part of his mind that knew it. He wrote, that af­ter­noon, with the news of Guild­hall going down Fleet Street under his win­dow and the Michael­mas term a month off and the Inn settled in its opin­ion, as a man writes who has been given away and means to be worth the tak­ing back: so that who­ever read the thir­teenth num­ber on the first of Decem­ber, in Rus­sell Square or the City or two pair of stairs up over a law-sta­tioner’s, should know at the first para­graph that it had not been writ­ten by any­body in Crown Office Row.

He did not know where it would be read. He knew that it would be read,

which was more than he had known in August; and he found that it was enough to write to, and that he had never be­fore in el­even months had any­thing to write to at all.

(To be con­tin­ued.)