He threw it down disgustedly.  It was poetry.  This man Pett appeared to have a perfect obsession for poetry.  One would never have suspected it, to look at him.  Jimmy had just resigned himself, after another glance at the shelf, to a bookless vigil, when his eye was caught by a name on the cover of the last in the row so unexpected that he had to look again to verify the discovery.

He had been perfectly right.  There it was, in gold letters.

THE LONELY HEART

BY

ANN CHESTER

He extracted the volume from the shelf in a sort of stupor.  Even now he was inclined to give his goddess of the red hair the benefit of the doubt, and assume that some one else of the same name had written it.  For it was a defect in Jimmy’s character—­one of his many defects—­that he loathed and scorned minor poetry and considered minor poets, especially when feminine, an unnecessary affliction.  He declined to believe that Ann, his Ann, a girl full of the finest traits of character, the girl who had been capable of encouraging a comparative stranger to break the law by impersonating her cousin Jimmy Crocker, could also be capable of writing The Lonely Heart and other poems.  He skimmed through the first one he came across, and shuddered.  It was pure slush.  It was the sort of stuff they filled up pages with in the magazines when the detective story did not run long enough.  It was the sort of stuff which long-haired blighters read alone to other long-haired blighters in English suburban drawing-rooms.  It was the sort of stuff which—­to be brief—­gave him the Willies.  No, it could not be Ann who had written it.

The next moment the horrid truth was thrust upon him.  There was an inscription on the title page.

“To my dearest uncle Peter, with love from the author, Ann Chester.”

The room seemed to reel before Jimmy’s eyes.  He felt as if a friend had wounded him in his tenderest feelings.  He felt as if some loved one had smitten him over the back of the head with a sandbag.  For one moment, in which time stood still, his devotion to Ann wobbled.  It was as if he had found her out in some terrible crime that revealed unsuspected flaws in her hitherto ideal character.

Then his eye fell upon the date on the title page, and a strong spasm of relief shook him.  The clouds rolled away, and he loved her still.  This frightful volume had been published five years ago.

A wave of pity swept over Jimmy.  He did not blame her now.  She had been a mere child five years ago, scarcely old enough to distinguish right from wrong.  You couldn’t blame her for writing sentimental verse at that age.  Why, at a similar stage in his own career he had wanted to be a vaudeville singer.  Everything must be excused to Youth.  It was with a tender glow of affectionate forgiveness that he turned the pages.