The knocker had been taken off the door of the house in Grosvenor Square in the last week of July, as it was taken off every year, to inform the world that the family was out of town; and the world, which was itself out of town, had taken no notice.

The family was at Ardoch. That is to say, Lady Ardoch was at Ardoch, with four guests, two pointers, and a Miss Lauder whom she had invited for her complexion; and the head of the family, who should have been there, was in London, in a house where the chandeliers had been bagged in holland and the furniture stood about the drawing-rooms in dust-sheets like a company of mourners waiting to be told whose funeral it was. It was the first of September. Every gentleman in England who could hold a gun was standing in a stubble field. Mr. Kinross was eating his breakfast.

He ate it in the small dining-room at the back, because the large one had been shut up, and he ate it alone, because there was nobody else, and he was served by Fenwick and two footmen, because that was the establishment, and it did not occur to anyone in the house that one man and a rack of toast might be served by fewer. The coffee was at his hand before he had looked for it. The Times was folded at the side of his plate, and beneath it the Morning Chronicle, which he took because it was a Whig paper and he wished to know what the Whigs were saying, and beneath that the Courier, which he took because it was not, and he wished to know that too. Fenwick had ironed all three. He had never asked Fenwick to iron the newspapers. He had never asked Fenwick for anything that he could remember, and it struck him, not for the first time that summer, that he had lived for six-and-thirty days in this house without once giving an order in it.

On the salver was a letter from his

aunt.

Lady Ardoch wrote a large, decided hand, crossed and recrossed, and she wrote as she talked, which was without stopping. The weather was fine. The birds were plentiful. Miss Lauder was a charming girl, and had asked twice whether Mr. Kinross was expected, and Lady Ardoch had been obliged to say she could not tell, since she had not been told. She could not conceive what kept him in London in September, unless it was his lawyers, and if it was his lawyers she could only say that she had never known a lawyer who could not be kept waiting by a gentleman with ten thousand a year. She remained his affectionate aunt. Under the signature, across the first page, in the smallest hand she had: Pray do not tell me it is the book.

He folded the letter and put it under the toast-rack, which was where he put letters he did not mean to answer that day, and Fenwick, who knew it, removed the toast-rack.

The newspapers were full of Manchester. They had been full of Manchester for a fortnight, since the Monday on which the yeomanry had ridden into a crowd of sixty thousand people in St. Peter’s Field with their sabres drawn, to arrest a man on a cart who could perfectly well have been arrested at his inn; and they would be full of it for a long time yet. The Courier printed the thanks of the Government to the magistrates, in a column of type that looked, he thought, as pleased with itself as type could look. The Chronicle printed the names of the dead, with their ages and their trades, under a heading which the Courier would call inflammatory and which was merely accurate. A weaver. A special constable. A woman. A child of two. He read them all, slowly, because it seemed to him that someone ought to read them who had not been there, and then he folded the paper and found that he had not tasted his coffee and that Fenwick had already replaced it with coffee that was hot.

It was not, he knew, any concern of his. He had no property in Lancashire and no opinions on the reform of Parliament that he had ever been required to express aloud. But he had spent the summer, and the nine years before it, in the company of a man who kept order for a King who did not trust him, and who had once, in the eighth number of The Lord Warden, ridden into a market-place at Ludlow with forty spears to put down a riot of weavers; and he had written that scene with great care and a good deal of satisfaction, and had been rather proud of the weavers. He did not feel proud of them this morning. He sat with the folded Chronicle under his

hand and saw, with the disagreeable clearness that comes upon a man at breakfast, that the Warden had been in Manchester on the sixteenth of August, and that he had sent him there.

“Will you take the carriage, sir?” said Fenwick.

He had not said that he was going out. “I will walk,” he said; and the satisfaction of having, for once, said something that Fenwick could not have said for him carried him as far as Brook Street before he understood that it was a very small satisfaction for a man of two-and-thirty.

*  *  *  *  *

The Albemarle was published from a house in Albemarle Street, between the Royal Institution, where the fashionable world had gone in Sir Humphry Davy’s day to watch things set on fire, and Grillion’s, where it had gone afterwards to dine. Mr. Radcliffe had the ground floor for his shop and the first floor for his drawing-room, in which he gave dinners to authors who might be of use to him, and a back room on the ground floor in which he did his business; and it was to the back room that Mr. Kinross was shown, without being announced, because he was the only man in London to whom Mr. Radcliffe was always at home.

It was the first of the month, and the back room was full of magazines. The Albemarle lay on every chair, in its buff wrapper, still smelling of the press; and on the table, in a heap that Mr. Radcliffe pretended not to have looked at, lay everybody else’s: the Monthly, the European, the New Monthly, the Gentleman’s, and the blue-grey wrapper of the Ludgate.

“You have seen the tenth number,” said Mr. Radcliffe. He was a large, pale, careful man, who had been a bookseller’s apprentice in Edinburgh and had never forgotten it, and he said it in the tone in which a physician says that a patient is comfortable.

“I wrote it.”

“It is much admired,” said Mr. Radcliffe, “by those who admire it.” He moved the Ludgate half an inch, so that it lay square with the edge of the table. “I had a letter from Lord Ashcombe. He wished me to say that the siege in the ninth number was the finest thing of its kind since Froissart.”

“Lord Ashcombe has not read Froissart.”

“That is very possible. He has not read the Warden either, I think, but he is a subscriber, and I value his opinion.” Mr. Radcliffe sat down, which he did not usually do in Mr. Kinross’s presence, and put the tips of his fingers together. “I will be plain with you, sir, since you pay me

to be. We lose by the Warden about what I told you in June. I can bear it. You can bear it a good deal more easily than I can. But it is the first of September, and the town is talking about Manchester, and about nothing else, and I should be glad if the eleventh number had a little more in it of what the town is talking about.”

“A massacre,” said Mr. Kinross.

“An incident,” said Mr. Radcliffe, with a faint emphasis, as of a man correcting the proof of somebody else’s newspaper. “We are printing a very temperate article in October, in support of the magistrates. And young Wray has a second paper for us on the Cockney School, which I think will make a stir.” He touched the blue-grey wrapper again. “Baldock is lucky. He has a page on Manchester in this number, set in the last week of August, I don’t know how; he must have held his press for it. And he has a comedy of the Manchester trade in the same number, as it happens, which in any other month would have been thought vulgar, and in this one will be thought prophetic. Wray means to take it to pieces in October.”

Mr. Kinross looked at the wrapper. He had a high opinion of very few men and a low opinion of Lucius Wray, whose debts he had paid once, three years ago, for reasons that he had not explained to anybody and did not now propose to explain to Mr. Radcliffe; and he found that he did not care, as much as he would have expected, to think of Lucius Wray taking the Mortimers to pieces. It was not that he admired them. He had not decided what he thought of them. But he had decided, on a bench in the Temple garden, that they were competent, and he had not found that anybody else in Albemarle Street was in the habit of using the word.

“Will the eleventh number,” said Mr. Radcliffe, “have a little more incident in it?”

“No,” said Mr. Kinross. He picked up the Ludgate. “I will take this, if you have done with it.”

Mr. Radcliffe, who had read it from cover to cover at seven o’clock that morning, said that he had barely looked into it, and that Mr. Kinross was very welcome; and when the door had closed behind his principal proprietor he sat for some time looking at the place on the table where the Ludgate had been, and wondering, as he had wondered once or twice before in the course of a long and profitable life, what the devil a man of ten thousand a year wanted with a rival’s magazine.

*  *  *  *  *

He walked to the Temple, because he had said that he would walk, and because a man who has refused the

carriage in Grosvenor Square cannot very well take a hackney in Piccadilly; and he went down the Strand among the drays and the ballad-sellers and the boys crying the latest from Manchester, which was a week old, with the Ludgate under his arm like any clerk, and in at the Inner Temple gate as St. Dunstan’s giants struck twelve.

Figgis said good morning to him in the lane. Figgis said good morning to him every morning, in a manner which conveyed that it was a privilege for the morning, and that Figgis would not have said it to everybody.

At his desk he read Mr. Baldock’s page on Manchester first, because he had been told it was there, and found it short, angry and plainly written, by somebody who had been in St. Peter’s Field and had not been able to get the sound of it out of his head; it had been set in a smaller type than the rest of the number, as if it had been squeezed in with a shoehorn, and it was better than anything in the Courier by the width of England. Then he turned to the fifth number of The Mortimers of Mount Street, and settled himself to decide, once and for all, what he thought of it.

The fifth number was about a footman.

It had seemed, in the fourth, that it would be about Miss Mortimer and the house she had not been asked to; but the Author had set that aside, with a briskness he was coming to recognise, and had opened instead upon a morning in Mount Street on which Thomas, the second footman, had come into the breakfast-parlour and given notice. Thomas did not say why. Mrs. Mortimer supposed it was the wages, and offered more; Miss Mortimer supposed it was a young woman, and was rebuked; the butler supposed it was the place, and was not asked. Mr. Kinross, who had not expected to be amused, found that he was reading with the exact care of a man who is waiting to be disappointed, and that he was not disappointed, and that the number was nearly over.

Then, at the foot of a column, he came upon a sentence that he knew.

He knew it before he knew why. He knew it as a man knows his own step on a stair, by the weight of it, before he has thought whose step it is: the long fall of the clause, the turn upon understood, the semicolons laid down like stepping-stones across a stream. He read it to the end. Then he got up, and took the ninth number of the Albemarle from the shelf behind him, and opened it at the place between the letter and the sermon, and laid the two magazines side by side upon the desk, the buff wrapper and the blue.

It was his. It was his to the last stone, except where it was not. Until that hour had become until Thomas gave notice. The one thing was so easily had had become the one was to be had for thirty pounds a year. Five-and-thirty years had acquired in the Manchester trade, and the belief had become the firm belief, which was the only one of the alterations that he could have improved upon, and he was not sure that he could. The Warden of the Marches, alone in a stone room with a King’s letter, had become a cotton-man from Manchester in a dining-room in Mount Street, in want of a footman; and the sentence, which had cost Mr. Kinross a week in the spring and which he had believed, privately, to be the best thing he had ever written, was funny.

He laughed.

He did not do it often, and he did it now so suddenly and so loud that a pigeon got up off the window-sill, and somebody on the stair below stopped and then went on. He laughed with his hand flat on the two magazines, as a man laughs at a good stroke made against him at fives; and when he had done he sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling, which needed whitewashing, and considered what had happened to him.

Somebody had read the Warden.

Not looked into it, not subscribed to it, not admired it to Mr. Radcliffe by letter, but read it, the ninth number, through the siege and the sermon, which he knew nobody could read; and had found, between the one and the other, the only paragraph in it that he had written for himself; and had taken it. Nobody steals what he does not value. It was the first opinion of his work that he had ever been offered by a person who did not know who he was, and who had nothing to gain by flattering him, and nothing to lose by saying so; and it had been offered in the plainest language that one writer has for another, which is theft.

And then the thief had made it better. Not finer; he would not grant finer. But he had written the sentence in the Marches about a man who had no notion what anything cost, and the thief had moved it to a house where somebody knew to a shilling what a footman cost, and had put the price into the sentence, and the price was what made it true. To be had for thirty pounds a year. Mr. Kinross did not know what his own footmen were paid. He had never asked. Fenwick knew.

He looked for a long while at the blue-grey wrapper, and at the words The Mortimers of Mount Street in its list of contents; and then, without quite meaning to, he took up his pencil

and made a tick beside them, as he had in August. The Author was clever; that much the page proved. The rest Mr. Kinross supplied, as a man does who is used to being right. The Author was a young man; an Oxford man, very likely, who had quarrelled with his father and come up to London to make his name by his pen; who wrote in a coffee-house and dined on credit, and had never set foot in a counting-house in his life. And he had an ear.

He was wrong in every particular but the last.

*  *  *  *  *

The eleventh number of The Lord Warden was due in Albemarle Street on the tenth, and it had not been begun.

It had not been begun because the tenth had been so difficult. The Warden had answered the King at last, in a letter of four pages which Mr. Kinross had written eleven times, and which had gone to the printer in the second week of August with the feeling, familiar to him and never pleasant, of a thing sent out of the house before it was dressed. Since then he had sat at this desk on most afternoons and looked at a sheet of foolscap headed No. XI., and had written on it, at various times, the date of the Battle of Shrewsbury, the name of a horse, and a word which he had struck through. The difficulty was not that he did not know what happened next. He knew to the day what happened next; it was in the box for 1403. The difficulty was that he had lost, somewhere in the writing of the King’s letter, the reason for telling it.

He took the August Ludgate down from the shelf, where it lay marked in pencil, and opened it at the fourth number of the Mortimers, and found the paragraph beside which he had written competent.

He read it three times. It was not competent. He had known in August that it was not competent, and had written the word because he did not wish to write any other, and because it is a thing commonly done by men who own a share in one magazine to the authors of another. It was the best sentence in the number, and it was about a girl who had been dressed for a house she was not to enter, and it had been written, he was now quite sure, by somebody who had sat out a dinner in that gown. He put this down, after some thought, to the

young man’s having sisters.

He pulled the foolscap towards him and dipped his pen.

There was a hostage at Ludlow, in the box for 1403: a Welsh girl, the daughter of one of Glendower’s captains, kept in the castle against her father’s good behaviour, of whom the chroniclers said nothing at all except that she was there. He had always meant to do something with her, and had never known what. He knew now. He wrote, quickly, in the small fast hand that the laundress said was like a hen walking in ink, and he did not stop to cross anything out.

He read it over. It was not funny. It had been funny in Mount Street, where it had been something else, and he was aware, in the part of his mind that he did not commonly consult, that he had taken a thing that was not his and made it graver in the taking; and that this was precisely, stroke for stroke, what had been done to him; and that whoever had done it would know, on the first of October, that it had been noticed.

It was a curious way to begin a correspondence. It was the only way, he supposed, in which a man in King’s Bench Walk could begin one with a young man whose name he did not know, and who had sisters, without being introduced. He wrote on until the giants of St. Dunstan’s struck six and the light went off the river, and when he got up from the desk the eleventh number was four pages long, and he knew again the reason for telling it.

*  *  *  *  *

The Albemarle came to Salisbury Square on the third of September, two days late, because Mr. Pelham had taken it into the country.

Clemency had seen her own number on the first. She had gone up to the Row to look at it, as she did every month, without buying it, and had stood at Baldock’s window and read the list of contents through the glass, and had found, set in above the Mortimers in a smaller type than the rest, a page headed Manchester. She had known that it would be there; Mr. Baldock had held his press for it, and told her so, and told her that the town would read the Mortimers this month with some attention, since they were a Manchester family. He had meant it kindly. She had gone home and been unable to eat her dinner. Her father had bought fustians for twenty

years from a house in Manchester whose name she could still have written in her sleep; the Hindleys’ son had come to Bread Street once, and eaten roast mutton, and talked about looms; and she had spent the summer making the Manchester trade ridiculous for seven guineas a number, and had sent it out into a month in which people from the Manchester trade had been cut down with sabres in a field. It was not her fault. She had written it in July, and finished it on the fourth of August, twelve days before St. Peter’s Field. She told herself so a great many times, and it made no difference.

Kit had said, at supper, that Mr. Pelham said the yeomanry had done right, and that he rather thought they had; and Lucy had said that she was sure they had done wrong, and that she rather thought so too; and their mother had said that she did not see what Manchester had to do with any of them, and had then gone very quiet, and said that she wondered whether the Hindleys were all well.

So it was in no frame of mind for the Warden that Clemency took up the tenth number on the morning of the third, and she was surprised to find that she sat down to it.

The Warden had answered the King.

It was a long answer, and a hard one to read. It began by setting out, as carefully as a lease, which matters lay within the Warden’s authority and which lay outwith it; and she read it all; and somewhere in the third page, in the middle of an account of the fortifying of Ludlow which went on longer than anything ought to go on, with the river going down on the ebb beneath the castle wall, she came upon this:

She read it with the room quite still about her. It was impossible that it should have been written about Manchester. The number had been made up in August, before anybody in London had heard of St. Peter’s Field; she knew how long a number took to print better than anyone in that house. But it read, in the first week of September, as though the man had been standing on the hustings with a pencil, and she sat with the magazine in her lap and was angry with him, for a moment, for having been right by accident, which was a thing she had never been.

Then she turned the pages through to the end, slowly, looking for something.

She did not tell herself what she

was looking for. She was looking for a footman, or a dining-room, or a man from Manchester, or the turn of a sentence that she might know; for any sign, in short, that the fifth number of the Mortimers had been read in the place where the Warden was written. There was none. There could not have been; the tenth number had been printed before the fifth was published, and she was a fool. She shut the magazine, and found that the corner of the page with the Warden’s answer on it was turned down, and could not remember doing it.

She put on her bonnet, because the room had become too small to think in, and went out.

It was not yet three, and the garden would not be open; so she walked as far as the print-seller’s at the corner of Bouverie Street, which was as far as a woman could walk in Fleet Street without appearing to be going somewhere, and stood at the window.

The print-sellers of London sold London to itself in two kinds, and Mr. Brindle hung them side by side. On the left, in a black frame, was an old engraving of Temple Bar, done before she was born, so old that it still showed the iron spikes on the top of the gate where the City had once set the heads of traitors: and under the arch the whole street was crammed into a space a yard wide, carts and chairmen and a ballad-singer and a dog and a beadle and a man with a tray of pies, all shouting, as far as an engraving can shout. On the right, in a gilt one, was a view of the Inner Temple garden, drawn from some gentleman’s window above it: the long lawn, the gravel walks, the plane trees, the river wall, a barge with a brown sail, and nobody in it at all but a lady at the wall and a gentleman on a bench, too small to have faces.

The two pictures were of places perhaps three hundred yards apart. She had looked at them a dozen times, and she saw now, as one sees a thing in a familiar room that has been there all the while, what was clever about them: that each had been made by leaving out the other. The man who drew the gate had left out the garden, which was behind it; the man at the window had left out the noise, which was a street away. A customer could carry home the din or the quiet for the same money, but not both. She did it herself every month, at seven guineas, and called it Mount Street.

And standing there, with her own face faint in the glass between the gate and the garden, she did what she had not allowed herself to do upstairs: she took the Warden to pieces.

The Warden lost money, and was not stopped. Mr. Baldock said that it

cost Albemarle Street twenty pounds a month; and a magazine does not carry twenty pounds a month for somebody’s nephew. It carries them for the man who owns it. The author, therefore, owned the Albemarle, or the better part of it, and was rich. That was one.

On the second page of his answer the Warden had written that a certain matter lay outwith his authority. No Englishman alive would have written outwith. The author was a Scot. That was two.

On the third page the Warden had stood on the wall at Ludlow and watched the river go down on the ebb. The Teme at Ludlow had no ebb; it was fifty miles and more from the nearest tide, and she knew it, because she had once spent a wet fortnight with a gazetteer. The man had looked at a tidal river so long, and so often, that he had given one to a river that had none. He wrote within sight of the Thames. That was three.

And the King’s letter had been answered as a deed is drawn, whereas and provided always and saving nevertheless, by somebody who had been bred to the law, or had sat a long time near it. That was four.

A rich Scot of the Inns of Court, who wrote within sight of the river. She looked up from the glass, along the street, to the gate and the roofs of the Temple beyond it, and very nearly laughed; for half the Temple answered to that description, and the other half was trying to. And a man of that kind, she thought, turning homeward, would no more read the Mortimers than he would read the Lady’s Cabinet; he did not know they existed; he never would.

She was right in every particular but the last.

She went home by Salisbury Court, and up the two pair of stairs, and into the back room; and when she had taken off her bonnet she did a thing that she did perhaps once a month, and never when anybody was by. She took out the portfolio.

It had been her father’s, and had held patterns of fustian. It held now, between its marbled boards, every picture she had ever begun of the Mortimers, and not one of them was finished. Mr. Mortimer at the head of his table, without a face. Mrs. Mortimer’s carriage at the door in Mount Street, very handsomely done, with the railings set at the kerb. Miss Mortimer in the gown she had been dressed in for Lady Harrowgate’s, the gown washed in to the last flounce, and the face left white, because Clemency had never been able to decide what the girl would look like at the moment she understood.

She had read Emma the winter it came out, in the copy from the circulating library on Ludgate Hill, and had laughed aloud at the portfolio Miss Woodhouse brought out to show Mr. Elton: the miniatures and half-lengths and whole-lengths, in pencil and crayon and water-colours, of which not one had ever been finished, and the Author’s verdict on them, which was that steadiness had always been wanting. It was not steadiness that was wanting in Salisbury Square. It was colours, which cost money; and daylight, which she could not paint by while she was writing by it; and a reason. Emma’s drawing had been carried to London by an admirer, and framed, and hung over a mantelpiece for the whole of Highbury to praise. A picture of Mount Street by somebody who had never set foot in Mount Street would be seen by nobody at all; she had known it every time she began one; and her drawings went back into a fustian-merchant’s portfolio, under the bed.

And yet she kept them, because there was a book in her head that was not the Mortimers as they were, sold by the sheet and forgotten by the month, but the Mortimers as they might one day be: three volumes in boards, with plates, and under each plate, in small capitals, drawn by the author. It was the most foolish thing she knew about herself, and she had told it to nobody.

She sat down at the desk, in what was left of the light, and began another. It was the garden of the Inner Temple, seen from the river wall: the long lawn, the plane trees, the gravel of the eastern walk, the bench under the second plane, and on the bench a gentleman, too small to have a face.

She did not finish it.

She would know on the first of October.

(To be continued.)