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A week passed, and then, one Friday morning, a new light burst on me. Miss Liston came into the garden at eleven o’clock and sat down by me on the lawn. Chillington and Pamela had gone riding with the squire, Dora was visiting the poor. We were alone. The appearance of Miss Liston at this hour (usually sacred to the use of the pen), no less than her puzzled look, told me that an obstruction had occurred in the novel. Presently she let me know what it was.

“I’m thinking of altering the scheme of my story, Mr. Wynne,” said she. “Have you ever noticed how sometimes a man thinks he’s in love when he isn’t really?”

“Such a case sometimes occurs,” I acknowledged.

“Yes, and he doesn’t find out his mistake—-“

“Till they’re married?”

“Sometimes, yes,” she said, rather as though she were making an unwilling admission. “But sometimes he sees it before–when he meets somebody else.”

“Very true,” said I, with a grave nod.

“The false can’t stand against the real,” pursued Miss Liston; and then she fell into meditative silence. I stole a glance at her face; she was smiling. Was it in the pleasure of literary creation–an artistic ecstasy? I should have liked to answer yes, but I doubted it very much. Without pretending to Miss Liston’s powers, I have the little subtlety that is needful to show me that more than one kind of smile may be seen on the human face, and that there is one very different from others; and, finally, that that one is not evoked, as a rule, merely by the evolution of the troublesome encumbrance in pretty writing vulgarly called a “plot.”

“If,” pursued Miss Liston, “someone comes who can appreciate him and draw out what is best in him—-“

“That’s all very well,” said I, “but what of the first girl?”

“Oh, she’s–she can be made shallow, you know; and I can put in a man for her. People needn’t be much interested in her.”

“Yes, you could manage it that way,” said I, thinking how Pamela–I took the liberty of using her name for the shallow girl–would like such treatment.

“She will really be valuable mainly as a foil,” observed Miss Liston; and she added generously, “I shall make her nice, you know, but shallow–not worthy of him.”

“And what are you going to make the other girl like?” I asked.

Miss Liston started slightly; also she colored very slightly, and she answered, looking away from me across the lawn:

“I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, Mr. Wynne.”

With the suspicion which this conversation aroused fresh in my mind, it was curious to hear Pamela laugh, as she said to me on the afternoon of the same day:

“Aren’t Sir Gilbert and Audrey Liston funny? I tell you what, Mr. Wynne, I believe they’re writing a novel together.”

“Perhaps Chillington’s giving her the materials for one,” I suggested.

“I shouldn’t think,” observed Pamela in her dispassionate way, “that anything very interesting had ever happened to him.”

“I thought you liked him,” I remarked humbly.

“So I do. What’s that got to do with it?” asked Pamela.

It was beyond question that Chillington enjoyed Miss Liston’s society; the interest she showed in him was incense to his nostrils. I used to overhear fragments of his ideas about himself which he was revealing in answer to her tactful inquiries. But neither was it doubtful that he had by no means lost his relish for Pamela’s lighter talk; in fact, he seemed to turn to her with some relief–perhaps it is refreshing to escape from self-analysis, even when the process is conducted in the pleasantest possible manner–and the hours which Miss Liston gave to work were devoted by Chillington to maintaining his cordial relations with the lady whose comfortable and not over-tragical disposal was taxing Miss Liston’s skill. For she had definitely decided all her plot–she told me so a few days later.

It was all planned out; nay, the scene in which the truth as to his own feelings bursts on Sir Gilbert (I forget at the moment what name the novel gave him) was, I understood, actually written; the shallow girl was to experience nothing worse than a wound to her vanity, and was to turn, with as much alacrity as decency allowed, to the substitute whom Miss Liston had now provided. All this was poured into my sympathetic ear, and I say sympathetic in all sincerity; for, although I may occasionally treat Miss Liston’s literary efforts with less than proper respect, she herself was my friend, and the conviction under which she was now living would, I knew, unless it were justified, bring her into much of that unhappiness in which one generally found her heroine plunged about the end of Volume II. The heroine generally got out all right, and the knowledge that she would enabled the reader to preserve cheerfulness. But would poor little Miss Liston get out? I was none too sure of it.