The novels of Charles Langholm were chiefly remarkable for their intricate plots, and for the hope of better things that breathed through the cheap sensation of the best of them.  But it was a hope that had been deferred a good many years.  His manner was better than his matter; indeed, an incongruous polish was said by the literary to prevent Langholm from being a first favorite either with the great public or the little critics.  As a maker of plots, however, he still had humble points; and Rachel assured him that she had burnt her candle all night in order to solve one of his ingenious mysteries.

“What!” he cried; “you call yourself a lady, and you don’t look at the end before you reach it?”

“Not when it’s a good book.”

“Well, you have pitched on about the best of a bad lot; and it’s a satisfaction to know you didn’t cut the knot it took some months to tie.”

Rachel was greatly interested.  She had never before met a literary man; had no idea how the trick was done; and she asked many of those ingenuous questions which seldom really displease the average gentleman of this type.  When not expatiating upon the heroine whom the exigencies of “serial rights” demanded in his books, Charles Langholm, the talker and the man, was an unmuzzled misogynist.  But nobody would have suspected it from his answers to Rachel’s questions, or from any portion of their animated conversation.  Certainly the aquiline lady whom Langholm had taken in, and to whom he was only attentive by remorseful fits and penitential starts, had not that satisfaction; for her right-hand neighbor did not speak to her at all.  There was thus one close and critical follower of a conversation which without warning took the one dramatic turn for which Rachel was forever on her guard; only this once, in an hour of unexpected entertainment, was she not.

“How do I get my plots?” said Langholm.  “Sometimes out of my head, as they say in the nursery; occasionally from real life; more often a blend of the two combined.  You don’t often get a present from the newspaper that you can lift into a magazine more or less as it stands.  Facts are stubborn things; they won’t serialize.  But now and then there’s a case.  There was one a little time ago.  Oh, there was a great case not long since, if we had but the man to handle it, without spoiling it, in English fiction!”

“And what was that?”

“The Minchin case!”

And he looked straight at her, as one only looks at one’s neighbor at table when one is saying or hearing something out of the common; he turned half round, and he looked in Rachel’s face with the smile of an artist with a masterpiece in his eye.  It was an inevitable moment, come at last when least expected; instinct, however, had prepared Rachel, just one moment before; and after all she could stare coldly on his enthusiasm, without a start or a tremor to betray the pose.

“Yes?” she said, her fine eyebrows raised a little.  “And do you really think that would make a book?”