[Illustration:  MR. BLANK MADE HIMSELF QUITE AT HOME]

“William!  Come to tea!”

“You stay here,” whispered William.  “I’ll bring you some.”

But luck was against him.  It was a visitors’ tea in the drawing-room, and Mrs. de Vere Carter, a neighbour, there, in all her glory.  She rose from her seat with an ecstatic murmur.

“Willie! Dear child! Sweet little soul!”

With one arm she crushed the infuriated William against her belt, with the other she caressed his hair.  Then William in moody silence sat down in a corner and began to eat bread and butter.  Every time he prepared to slip a piece into his pocket, he found his mother’s or Mrs. de Vere Carter’s eye fixed upon him and hastily began to eat it himself.  He sat, miserable and hot, seeing only the heroic figure starving in the next room, and planned a raid on the larder as soon as he could reasonably depart.  Every now and then he scowled across at Mrs. de Vere Carter and made a movement with his hands as though pulling a cap over his eyes.  He invested even his eating with an air of dark mystery.

Then Robert, his elder brother, came in, followed by a thin, pale man with eye-glasses and long hair.

“This is Mr. Lewes, mother,” said Robert with an air of pride and triumph.  “He’s editor of Fiddle Strings.”

There was an immediate stir and sensation.  Robert had often talked of his famous friend.  In fact Robert’s family was weary of the sound of his name, but this was the first time Robert had induced him to leave the haunts of his genius to visit the Brown household.

Mr. Lewes bowed with a set, stern, self-conscious expression, as though to convey to all that his celebrity was more of a weight than a pleasure to him.  Mrs. de Vere Carter bridled and fluttered, for Fiddle Strings had a society column and a page of scrappy “News of the Town,” and Mrs. de Vere Carter’s greatest ambition was to see her name in print.

Mr. Lewes sat back in his chair, took his tea-cup as though it were a fresh addition to his responsibilities, and began to talk.  He talked apparently without even breathing.  He began on the weather, drifted on to art and music, and was just beginning a monologue on The Novel, when William rose and crept from the room like a guilty spirit.  He found Mr. Blank under the library table, having heard a noise in the kitchen and fearing a visitor.  A cigar and a silver snuffer had fallen from his pocket to the floor.  He hastily replaced them.  William went up and took another look at the wonderful ears and heaved a sigh of relief.  While parted from his strange friend he had had a horrible suspicion that the whole thing was a dream.

“I’ll go to the larder and get you sumthin’,” he said.  “You jus’ stay here.”

“I think, young gent,” said Mr. Blank, “I think I’ll just go an’ look round upstairs on the quiet like, an’ you needn’t mention it to no one.  See?”