“Annie, dear, dear Annie, what are you saying to me?  I have never heard such beautiful words.  Tell me, Annie, what do they mean?”

She laughed, and said it was only nonsense that the nurses sang to the children.

“No, no, you are not to call me Master Lucian any more,” he said, when they parted, “you must call me Lucian; and I, I worship you, my dear Annie.”

He fell down before her, embracing her knees, and adored, and she allowed him, and confirmed his worship.  He followed slowly after her, passing the path which led to her home with a longing glance.  Nobody saw any difference in Lucian when he reached the rectory.  He came in with his usual dreamy indifference, and told how he had lost his way by trying the short cut.  He said he had met Dr. Burrows on the road, and that he had recommended the path by the fields.  Then, as dully as if he had been reading some story out of a newspaper, he gave his father the outlines of the Beit case, producing the pretty little book called The Chorus in Green.  The parson listened in amazement.

“You mean to tell me that you wrote this book?” he said.  He was quite roused.

“No; not all of it.  Look; that bit is mine, and that; and the beginning of this chapter.  Nearly the whole of the third chapter is by me.”

He closed the book without interest, and indeed he felt astonished at his father’s excitement.  The incident seemed to him unimportant.

“And you say that eighty or ninety pages of this book are yours, and these scoundrels have stolen your work?”

“Well, I suppose they have.  I’ll fetch the manuscript, if you would like to look at it.”

The manuscript was duly produced, wrapped in brown paper, with Messrs Beit’s address label on it, and the post-office dated stamps.

“And the other book has been out a month.”  The parson, forgetting the sacerdotal office, and his good habit of grinning, swore at Messrs Beit and Mr. Ritson, calling them damned thieves, and then began to read the manuscript, and to compare it with the printed book.

“Why, it’s splendid work.  My poor fellow,” he said after a while, “I had no notion you could write so well.  I used to think of such things in the old days at Oxford; ‘old Bill,’ the tutor, used to praise my essays, but I never wrote anything like this.  And this infernal ruffian of a Ritson has taken all your best things and mixed them up with his own rot to make it go down.  Of course you’ll expose the gang?”

Lucian was mildly amused; he couldn’t enter into his father’s feelings at all.  He sat smoking in one of the old easy chairs, taking the rare relish of a hot grog with his pipe, and gazing out of his dreamy eyes at the violent old parson.  He was pleased that his father liked his book, because he knew him to be a deep and sober scholar and a cool judge of good letters; but he laughed to himself when he saw the magic of print.  The parson had expressed