The Professor sat silent:  there was too cruel an irony in the coincidence.

Harviss looked up at him in surprise.

“Well, what’s the matter with taking my advice—­you’re not going out of literature, are you?”

The Professor rose from his chair.  “No—­I’m going into it,” he said simply.

“Going into it?”

“I’m going to write a real book—­a serious one.”

“Good Lord!  Most people think ‘The Vital Thing’ ’s serious.”

“Yes—­but I mean something different.”

“In your old line—­beetles and so forth?”

“Yes,” said the Professor solemnly.

Harviss looked at him with equal gravity.  “Well, I’m sorry for that,” he said, “because it takes you out of our bailiwick.  But I suppose you’ve made enough money out of ‘The Vital Thing’ to permit yourself a little harmless amusement.  When you want more cash come back to us—­only don’t put it off too long, or some other fellow will have stepped into your shoes.  Popularity don’t keep, you know; and the hotter the success the quicker the commodity perishes.”

He leaned back, cheerful and sententious, delivering his axioms with conscious kindliness.

The Professor, who had risen and moved to the door, turned back with a wavering step.

“When did you say another volume would have to be ready?” he faltered.

“I said October—­but call it a month later.  You don’t need any pushing nowadays.”

“And—­you’d have no objection to letting me have a little advance now?  I need some new instruments for my real work.”

Harviss extended a cordial hand.  “My dear fellow, that’s talking—­I’ll write the cheque while you wait; and I daresay we can start up the cheap edition of ‘The Vital Thing’ at the same time, if you’ll pledge yourself to give us the book by November.—­How much?” he asked, poised above his cheque-book.

In the street, the Professor stood staring about him, uncertain and a little dazed.

“After all, it’s only putting it off for six months,” he said to himself; “and I can do better work when I get my new instruments.”

He smiled and raised his hat to the passing victoria of a lady in whose copy of “The Vital Thing” he had recently written: 

_ Labor est etiam ipsa voluptas._

THE OTHER TWO

I

WAYTHORN, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner.

It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation.  He was not so old, to be sure—­his glass gave him little more than the five-and-thirty years to which his wife confessed—­but he had fancied himself already in the temperate zone; yet here he was listening for her step with a tender sense of all it symbolized, with some old trail of verse about the garlanded nuptial door-posts floating through his enjoyment of the pleasant room and the good dinner just beyond it.