But Mrs. Crowl was glaring too viciously at Mr. Crowl to reply.  He understood the message as if it were printed.  It ran:  “You have broken one of my best glasses.  You have annihilated threepence, or a week’s school fees for half the family.”  Peter wished she would turn the lightning upon Denzil, a conductor down whom it would run innocuously.  He stooped down and picked up the pieces as carefully as if they were cuttings from the Koh-i-noor.  Thus the lightning passed harmlessly over his head and flew towards Cantercot.

“What do I mean?” Mrs. Crowl echoed, as if there had been no interval.  “I mean that it would be a good thing if you had been murdered.”

“What unbeautiful ideas you have to be sure!” murmured Denzil.

“Yes; but they’d be useful,” said Mrs. Crowl, who had not lived with Peter all these years for nothing.  “And if you haven’t been murdered, what have you been doing?”

“My dear, my dear,” put in Crowl, deprecatingly, looking up from his quadrupedal position like a sad dog, “you are not Cantercot’s keeper.”

“Oh, ain’t I?” flashed his spouse.  “Who else keeps him, I should like to know?”

Peter went on picking up the pieces of the Koh-i-noor.

“I have no secrets from Mrs. Crowl,” Denzil explained courteously.  “I have been working day and night bringing out a new paper.  Haven’t had a wink of sleep for three nights.”

Peter looked up at his bloodshot eyes with respectful interest.

“The capitalist met me in the street—­an old friend of mine—­I was overjoyed at the rencontre and told him the idea I’d been brooding over for months, and he promised to stand all the racket.”

“What sort of a paper?” said Peter.

“Can you ask?  To what do you think I’ve been devoting my days and nights but to the cultivation of the Beautiful?”

“Is that what the paper will be devoted to?”

“Yes.  To the Beautiful.”

“I know,” snorted Mrs. Crowl, “with portraits of actresses.”

“Portraits?  Oh, no!” said Denzil.  “That would be the True, not the Beautiful.”

“And what’s the name of the paper?” asked Crowl.

“Ah, that’s a secret, Peter.  Like Scott, I prefer to remain anonymous.”

“Just like your Fads.  I’m only a plain man, and I want to know where the fun of anonymity comes in.  If I had any gifts, I should like to get the credit.  It’s a right and natural feeling to my thinking.”

“Unnatural, Peter; unnatural.  We’re all born anonymous, and I’m for sticking close to Nature.  Enough for me that I disseminate the Beautiful.  Any letters come during my absence, Mrs. Crowl?”

“No,” she snapped.  “But a gent named Grodman called.  He said you hadn’t been to see him for some time, and looked annoyed to hear you’d disappeared.  How much have you let him in for?”

“The man’s in my debt,” said Denzil, annoyed.  “I wrote a book for him and he’s taken all the credit for it, the rogue!  My name doesn’t appear even in the Preface.  What’s that ticket you’re looking so lovingly at, Peter?”