It was true that she did not sleep for hours, and on awaking the next morning another phenomenon awaited her.  The “little house under the hill” was immeasurably shrunken.  Poor Aunt Mary, who did not understand that a performance of “Pinafore” could give birth to the unfulfilled longings which result in the creation of high things, spoke to Uncle Tom a week later concerning an astonishing and apparently abnormal access of industry.

“She’s been reading all day long, Tom, or else shut up in her room, where Catherine tells me she is writing.  I’m afraid Eleanor Hanbury is right when she says I don’t understand the child.  And yet she is the same to me as though she were my own.”

It was true that Honora was writing, and that the door was shut, and that she did not feel the heat.  In one of the bookcases she had chanced upon that immortal biography of Dr. Johnson, and upon the letters of another prodigy of her own sex, Madame d’Arblay, whose romantic debut as an authoress was inspiration in itself.  Honora actually quivered when she read of Dr. Johnson’s first conversation with Miss Burney.  To write a book of the existence of which even one’s own family did not know, to publish it under a nom de plume, and to awake one day to fetes and fame would be indeed to live!

Unfortunately Honora’s novel no longer exists, or the world might have discovered a second Evelina.  A regard for truth compels the statement that it was never finished.  But what rapture while the fever lasted!  Merely to take up the pen was to pass magically through marble portals into the great world itself.

The Sir Charles Grandison of this novel was, needless to say, not Peter Erwin.  He was none other than Mr. Randolph Leffingwell, under a very thin disguise.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH PROVIDENCE BEEPS FAITH

Two more years have gone by, limping in the summer and flying in the winter, two more years of conquests.  For our heroine appears to be one of the daughters of Helen, born to make trouble for warriors and others —­and even for innocent bystanders like Peter Erwin.  Peter was debarred from entering those brilliant lists in which apparel played so great a part.  George Hanbury, Guy Rossiter, Algernon Cartwright, Eliphalet Hopper Dwyer—­familiarly known as “Hoppy”—­and other young gentlemen whose names are now but memories, each had his brief day of triumph.  Arrayed like Solomon in wonderful clothes from the mysterious and luxurious East, they returned at Christmas-tide and Easter from college to break lances over Honora.  Let us say it boldly—­she was like that:  she had the world-old knack of sowing discord and despair in the souls of young men.  She was—­as those who had known that fascinating gentleman were not slow to remark—­Randolph Leffingwell over again.

During the festival seasons, Uncle Tom averred, they wore out the latch on the front gate.  If their families possessed horses to spare, they took Honora driving in Forest Park; they escorted her to those anomalous dances peculiar to their innocent age, which are neither children’s parties nor full-fledged balls; their presents, while of no intrinsic value—­as one young gentleman said in a presentation speech—­had an enormous, if shy, significance.