“You’re not going!” she exclaimed.

He glanced significantly at the hall clock.

“Why, it’s long after bedtime, Honora.”

“I don’t want to go to bed.  I feel like talking,” she declared.  “Come, let’s sit on the steps awhile.  If you go home, I shan’t go to sleep for hours, Peter.”

“And what would Aunt Mary say to me?” he inquired.

“Oh, she wouldn’t care.  She wouldn’t even know it.”

He shook his head, still smiling.

“I’d never be allowed to take you to Uhrig’s Cave, or anywhere else, again,” he replied.  “I’ll come to-morrow evening, and you can talk to me then.”

“I shan’t feel like it then,” she said in a tone that implied his opportunity was now or never.  But seeing him still obdurate, with startling suddenness she flung her arms mound his neck—­a method which at times had succeeded marvellously—­and pleaded coaxingly:  “Only a quarter of an hour, Peter.  I’ve got so many things to say, and I know I shall forget them by to-morrow.”

It was a night of wonders.  To her astonishment the hitherto pliant Peter, who only existed in order to do her will, became transformed into a brusque masculine creature which she did not recognize.  With a movement that was almost rough he released himself and fled, calling back a “good night” to her out of the darkness.  He did not even wait to assist her in the process of locking up.  Honora, profoundly puzzled, stood for a while in the doorway gazing out into the night.  When at length she turned, she had forgotten him entirely.

It was true that she did not sleep for hours, and on awaking the next morning another phenomenon awaited her.  The “little house under the hill” was immeasurably shrunken.  Poor Aunt Mary, who did not understand that a performance of “Pinafore” could give birth to the unfulfilled longings which result in the creation of high things, spoke to Uncle Tom a week later concerning an astonishing and apparently abnormal access of industry.

“She’s been reading all day long, Tom, or else shut up in her room, where Catherine tells me she is writing.  I’m afraid Eleanor Hanbury is right when she says I don’t understand the child.  And yet she is the same to me as though she were my own.”

It was true that Honora was writing, and that the door was shut, and that she did not feel the heat.  In one of the bookcases she had chanced upon that immortal biography of Dr. Johnson, and upon the letters of another prodigy of her own sex, Madame d’Arblay, whose romantic debut as an authoress was inspiration in itself.  Honora actually quivered when she read of Dr. Johnson’s first conversation with Miss Burney.  To write a book of the existence of which even one’s own family did not know, to publish it under a nom de plume, and to awake one day to fetes and fame would be indeed to live!

Unfortunately Honora’s novel no longer exists, or the world might have discovered a second Evelina.  A regard for truth compels the statement that it was never finished.  But what rapture while the fever lasted!  Merely to take up the pen was to pass magically through marble portals into the great world itself.