Rachel asked no more questions; but she was not altogether sorry that the matter had already become one of common gossip throughout the house.  Meanwhile she made no allusion to it at breakfast, but her observation had been quickened by the events of the morning, and thus it was that she noticed and recognized the narrow blue book which was too long for her husband’s breast-pocket, and would show itself as he stooped over his coffee.  It was his check-book, and Rachel had not seen it since their travels.

That afternoon a not infrequent visitor arrived on his bicycle, to which was tied a bouquet of glorious roses instead of a lamp; this was Charles Langholm, the novelist, who had come to live in Delverton, over two hundred miles from his life-long haunts and the literary market-place, chiefly because upon a happy-go-lucky tour through the district he had chanced upon what he never tired of calling “the ideal rose-covered cottage of my dreams,” though also for other reasons unknown in Yorkshire.  His flat was abandoned before quarter-day, his effects transplanted at considerable cost, and ever since Langholm had been a bigoted countryman, who could not spend a couple of days in town without making himself offensive on the subject at his club, where he was nevertheless discreetly vague as to the exact locality of his rural paradise.  Even at the club, however, it was admitted that his work had improved almost as much as his appearance; and he put it all down to the roses in which he lived embowered for so many months of the year.  Such was their profusion that you could have filled a clothes-basket without missing one, and Langholm never visited rich or poor without a little offering out of his abundance.

“They may be coals to Newcastle,” he would say to the Woodgates or the Steels, “but none of your Tyneside collieries are a patch on mine.”

Like most victims of the artistic temperament, the literary Langholm was a creature of moods; but the very fact of a voluntary visit from him was sufficient guarantee of the humor in which he came, and this afternoon he was at his best.  He had indeed been writing all day, and for many days past, and was filled with the curious exhilaration which accompanies an output too rapid and too continuous to permit a running sense of the defects.  He was a ship with a fair wind, which he valued the more for the belts of calms and the adverse weather through which he had passed and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was a happy man, though one with no illusion as to the present product of his teeming pen.

“It is nonsense,” he said to Rachel, in answer to a question from that new and sympathetic friend, “but it is not such nonsense as to seem nothing else when one’s in the act of perpetrating it, and what more can one want?  It had to be done by the tenth of August, and by Jove it will be!  A few weeks ago I didn’t think it possible; but the summer has thawed my ink.”