soon,” he said involuntarily.

“I hardly think so. They would not call under all the circumstances; at least it would be strange if they did.”

“Perhaps not, but—” He broke off. “Tell me more of what’s in your mind. You know what you are to me, and I can’t help feeling rather responsible.”

“It’s hard to tell you without seeming an utter fool. It vexes and amuses me all at once,” she said simply. “It’s things I’ve never been conscious of before. I’m not actually conscious of them now, but it’s as if something had suggested their existence. At the same time I know I’ll never quite understand. I’m not built that way. Perhaps I get something through what I feel for you because you feel it, even though it’s past me. Does this all sound like gibberish? Then again it is as though both of us were being threatened. I wonder if you understand that all this is so different from anything I’ve felt before that I don’t quite know what to do.”

Derrick listened seriously. His first impulse was to laugh her mood away, but instantly there came to him from the surrounding shadows a warning that on no account must he be false to that which he himself believed. Pondering this, he knew that he could not deny these mysterious powers that now proclaimed themselves. He might desert their kingdom, but to disown it was impossible.

“If the place does not agree with you, we’ll chuck it,” he said slowly.

She sent him a whimsical smile. “You know that’s out of the question, dear old boy. We simply can’t; we’re in too deep for the next year. And forgive me if I talk to you as though you were my sister, for that’s one of my selfish habits, and it’s really your own fault for standing it. Here we stick till that novel is finished and sold. I’m sorry it doesn’t go as fast as you would like.”

“It will when I get shaken down,” he answered doggedly. “Trouble is that one is apt to think of too many things at once. Then follows the discarding and selecting process, and I suppose I’m going through that now. The point is to be sure of retaining what is really worth while; and, when I begin to feel that, it means confidence and progress. In that last novel I didn’t quite know what to discard, and it jumps at me from every page. But now,” he concluded with a little lift in his voice, “I’ve an idea that I’m just on the edge of something big.”

“While your sister,” she murmured absently, “has a perfectly ridiculous sensation that she’s just on 

 Prev. P 34/183 next