that they will take his noisy horse-laugh for humor.  That’s Octavius Quirk as a writer—­a nobody, a nothing, a wisp of straw in convulsions; but as a puffer—­ah, there you have him!—­as a puffer, magnificent, glorious, a Greek hero, invincible, invulnerable.  My good man, it’s Octavius Quirk you should go to!  Get him to call on his pack of beagles to give tongue; and then, my goodness, you’ll hear a cry—­for a while at least.  Is there anything at all in the book?”

“I don’t know,” said Harry Thornhill, who had changed quickly, and was now regaling himself with a little of Miss Burgoyne’s lemonade, with which the prima-donna was so kind as to keep him supplied.  “Well, now, I shall be on the stage some time; what do you say to looking over Lady Adela’s novel?”

“All right.”

There was a tapping at the door; it was the call-boy.

But Lionel Moore did not immediately answer the summons.

“Look here, Maurice; if you should find anything in the book—­anything you could say a word in favor of—­I wish you’d come round to the Garden Club with me, after the performance, and have a bit of supper.  Octavius Quirk is almost sure to be there.”

“What, Quirk?  I thought the Garden was given over to dukes and comic actors?”

“There’s a sprinkling of everybody in it,” the young baritone said; “and Quirk likes it because it is an all-night club—­he never seems to go to bed at all.  Will you do that?”

“Oh, yes,” Maurice Mangan said; and forthwith, as his friend left the dressing-room, he plunged into Lady Adela’s novel.

The last act of “The Squire’s Daughter” is longer than its predecessors; so that Mangan had plenty of time to acquire some general knowledge of the character and contents of these three volumes.  Indeed, he had more than time for all the brief scrutiny he deemed necessary; when Lionel Moore reappeared, to get finally quit of his theatrical trappings for the night, his friend was standing at the fireplace, looking at a sketch in brown chalk of Miss Burgoyne, which that amiable young lady had herself presented to Harry Thornhill.

“Well, what’s the verdict?”

Mangan turned round, rather bewildered; and then he recollected that he had been glancing at the novel.

“Oh, that!” he said, regarding the three volumes with no very favorable air, “Mighty poor stuff, I should say; just about as weak as they make it.  But harmless.  Some of the conversation—­between the women—­is natural; trivial, but natural.  The plain truth is, my dear Linn, it is a very foolish, stupid book, which should never have been printed at all; but I suppose your fashionable friend could afford to pay for having it printed.”

“But, look here, Maurice,” Lionel said, in considerable surprise, “I don’t see how it can be so very stupid, when Lady Adela herself is one of the brightest, cleverest, shrewdest, most intelligent women you could meet with anywhere—­quite unusually so.”