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And in these days Annie had at length finished her fair copy of Hector’s last book, writing it out in her own lovelily legible hand–not such as ladies in general count legible, because they can easily read it themselves; she could do better than that, she could write so that others could not fail to read. For Hector had always believed that the acceptance of his first volume had been owing not a little to the fact that he had written it out most legibly, and he held that what reveals itself at once and without possibility of mistake may justly hope for a better reception than what from the first moment annoys the reader with a sense of ill-treatment. It is no wonder, he said, if such a manuscript be at once tossed aside with an imprecation. Legibility is the first and intelligibility the only other thing rendered due by the submission of a manuscript to any publisher.

Hector spent a day or two in remodeling and modifying the passages remarked upon by his wife and his friend, and then, with hope reviving in both their hearts, the manuscript was sent in, acknowledged, and the day appointed when an answer would be ready.

Upon a certain dark morning, therefore, in November, having nothing else whatever to do, Hector set out in his much-worn Inverness cape to call upon his former publisher in the City, with whom of late he had had no communication. The weather was cold and damp, threatening rain. But Hector was too much of a Scotchman to care about weather, and too full of anxiety to mind either cold or wet. He had, indeed, almost always felt gloomy weather exciting rather than depressing. For one thing, it seemed, when he was indoors, to close him about with protection from uncongenial interruption, leaving the freer his inventive faculty; and now that he was abroad in it, and no inventive faculty left awake, it seemed to clothe him with congenial sympathy, for the weather was just the same inside him. And now, as he strode along with his eyes on the ground, he scarcely saw any of the objects about him, but sought only the heart of the City, where he hoped to find the publisher in his office, ready to print his manuscript, and advance him a small sum in anticipation of possible profit. So absorbed was he in thought undefined, and so sunk in anxiety as to the answer he was about to receive, that more than once he was nearly run over by the cart of some reckless tradesman–seeming to him, in its over-taking suddenness, the type of prophetic fate already at his heels.

At length, however, he arrived safe in the outer shop, where the books of the firm were exposed to sight, in process of being subscribed for by the trade. There a pert young man asked him to take a seat, while he carried his name to the publisher, and there for some time he waited, reading titles he found himself unable to lay hold of; and there, while he waited, the threatened rain began, and, ere he was admitted to the inner premises, such a black deluge came pouring down as, for blackness at least, comes down nowhere save in London. With this accompaniment, he was ushered at length into a dingy office, deep in the recesses of the house, where a young man whom he saw for the first time had evidently, while Hector waited in the shop, been glancing at the manuscript he had left. Little as he could have read, however, it had been enough, aided perhaps by the weather, to bring him to an unfavorable decision; his rejection was precise and definite, leaving no room for Hector to say anything, for he did not seem ever to have heard of him before. Hector rose at once, gathered up his papers from the table where they lay scattered, said “Good-morning,” and went out into the sooty rain.