“Yes, and if she isn’t the real thing, but merely a woman journalist trying to work us for a ‘story’ in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no more from her.”

“I don’t see anything to object to in your plan,” Verrian said, upon reflection.  “She certainly can’t complain of our being cautious.”

“No, and she won’t.  I shall have to refer the matter to the house—­”

“Oh, will you?”

“Why, certainly!  I couldn’t take a step like that without the approval of the house.”

“No,” Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer’s address from the letter.  Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at least so far as regarded the house.  The house had approved his plan, if one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers.  He recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary intelligence in a form ready for immediate use.  The case was fairly stated, but the privacy of the author’s correspondent was perfectly guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman.  Yet Verrian felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the table to his mother with rather a sick look.

After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been a good deal of talk between them about that girl.  Mrs. Verrian had agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and from making himself mischievous illusions from it.  She had since slept upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking, and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them, when fortune put this paragraph in her way.

“Isn’t it disgusting?” he asked.  “I don’t see how Armiger could let them do it.  I hope to heaven she’ll never see it!”

His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,

“Why?”

“What would she think of me?”

“I don’t know.  She might have expected something of the kind.”

“How expect something of the kind?  Am I one of the self-advertisers?”

“Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing.”

“Bold?”

“Venturesome,” Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her son’s eyes.

“I don’t understand you, mother.  I thought you agreed with me about the writer of that letter—­her sincerity, simplicity.”

“Sincerity, yes.  But simplicity—­Philip, a thoroughly single-minded girl never wrote that letter.  You can’t feel such a thing as I do.  A man couldn’t.  You can paint the character of women, and you do it wonderfully—­but, after all, you can’t know them as a woman does.”