. . . . . . .

Briefs poured in upon Rupert next day, and he was engaged for all the big Chancery cases.  Within a week his six plays were accepted, and within a fortnight he had entered Parliament as the miners’ Member for Coalville.  His marriage took place at the end of a month.  The wedding presents were even more numerous and costly than usual, and included thirty-five yards of book muslin, ten pairs of gloves, a sponge, two gimlets, five jars of cold cream, a copy of the Clergy List, three hat-guards, a mariner’s compass, a box of drawing-pins, an egg-breaker, six blouses, and a cabman’s whistle.  They were marked quite simply, “From a Grateful Friend.”

THE CIVIL SERVANT

It was three o’clock, and the afternoon sun reddened the western windows of one of the busiest of Government offices.  In an airy room on the third floor Richard Dale was batting.  Standing in front of the coal-box with the fire-shovel in his hands, he was a model of the strenuous young Englishman; and as for the third time he turned the Government india-rubber neatly in the direction of square-leg, and so completed his fifty, the bowler could hardly repress a sigh of envious admiration.  Even the reserved Matthews, who was too old for cricket, looked up a moment from his putting, and said, “Well played, Dick!”

The fourth occupant of the room was busy at his desk, as if to give the lie to the thoughtless accusation that the Civil Service cultivates the body at the expense of the mind.  The eager shouts of the players seemed to annoy him, for he frowned and bit his pen, or else passed his fingers restlessly through his hair.

“How the dickens you expect any one to think in this confounded noise,” he cried suddenly.

“What’s the matter, Ashby?”

“You’re the matter.  How am I going to get these verses done for The Evening Surprise if you make such a row?  Why don’t you go out to tea?”

“Good idea.  Come on, Dale.  You coming, Matthews?” They went out, leaving the room to Ashby.

In his youth Harold Ashby had often been told by his relations that he had a literary bent.  His letters home from school were generally pronounced to be good enough for Punch, and some of them, together with a certificate of character from his Vicar, were actually sent to that paper.  But as he grew up he realized that his genius was better fitted for work of a more solid character.  His post in the Civil Service gave him full leisure for his Adam:  A Fragment, his History of the Microscope, and his Studies in Rural Campanology, and yet left him ample time in which to contribute to the journalism of the day.

The poem he was now finishing for The Evening Surprise was his first contribution to that paper, but he had little doubt that it would be accepted.  It was called quite simply, “Love and Death,” and it began like this: 

“Love!  O love! (All other things above).—­Why, O why, Am I afraid to die?”