One day she came up from Cookham earlier than usual, looking very beautiful in a white boating-frock and a straw hat with a Leander ribbon.  Her hands and arms were hard with dragging a punting-hole, and she was sunburnt and happy, and hungry for tea.

“Why don’t you come down to Cookham and get out of this heat?” Miss Cavendish asked.  “You need it; you look ill.”

“I’d like to, but I can’t,” said Carroll.  “The fact is, I paid in advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I’d be losing five guineas a week on them.”

Miss Cavendish regarded him severely.  She had never quite mastered his American humor.

“But—­five guineas—­why, that’s nothing to you,” she said.  Something in the lodger’s face made her pause.  “You don’t mean—­”

“Yes, I do,” said the lodger, smiling.  “You see, I started in to lay siege to London without sufficient ammunition.  London is a large town, and it didn’t fall as quickly as I thought it would.  So I am economizing.  Mr. Lockhart’s Coffee Rooms and I are no longer strangers.”

Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.

“Are you in earnest?” she asked.  “For how long?”

“Oh, for the last month,” replied the lodger; “they are not at all bad—­clean and wholesome and all that.”

“But the suppers you gave us, and this,” she cried, suddenly, waving her hands over the pretty tea-things, “and the cake and muffins?”

“My friends, at least,” said Carroll, “need not go to Lockhart’s.”

“And the Savoy?” asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head.  “A dream of the past,” said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke.  “Gatti’s?  Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the Chancellor’s, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence—­a pot of bitter twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter.  It’s most amusing on the whole.  I am learning a little about London, and some things about myself.  They are both most interesting subjects.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly.  “When I think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel—­I feel like a robber.”

“Don’t,” begged Carroll.  “I am really the most happy of men—­that is, as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn’t so damned miserable.  But I owe no man a penny and I have assets—­I have L80 to last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made.  That’s enough.”

“But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?” asked Miss Cavendish.

“I do—­that is, I could,” answered Carroll, “if I wrote the things that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won’t.”

“And such plays!” exclaimed Marion, warmly; “and to think that they are going begging!” She continued, indignantly, “I can’t imagine what the managers do want.”