which have grown up beside us under the same roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which heaven itself could never be a home.

In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner. He had imagined that she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation he found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was talking. Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted. His strained face relaxed. She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue. Her face had brightened.

He had dreaded this dinner-party, this first essay to preserve his balance in public with his frightful invisible burden; but he was getting through it better than he had expected.

"I have come back to what is called society," Rachel was saying, "after nearly seven years of an exile something like Nebuchadnezzar's, and there are two things which I find as difficult as Kipling's 'silly sailors' found their harps 'which they twanged unhandily.'"

"Is small talk one of them?" asked Hugh. "It has always been a difficulty to me."

"On the contrary," said Rachel. "I plume myself on that. Surely my present sample is not so much below the average that you need ask me that."

"I did not recognize that it was small talk," said Hugh, with a faint smile. "If it really is, I can only say I shall have brain fever if you pass on to what you might call conversation."

It was to him as if a miniature wavelet of a great ocean somewhere in the distance had crept up to laugh and break at his feet. He did not recognize that this tiniest runlet which fell back at once was of the same element as the tidal wave which had swept over him yesternight.

"But are you aware," said Rachel, dropping her voice a little, "it is beginning to dawn upon me that this evening's gathering is met together for exalted conversation, and perhaps we ought to be practising a little. I feel certain that after dinner you will be 'drawn through the clefts of confession' by Miss Barker, the woman in the high dinner gown with orange velvet sleeves. Mrs. Loftus introduced her to me when I arrived as the 'apostle of humanity.'"

"Why should you fix on that particular apostle for me?" said Hugh, looking resentfully at a large-faced woman who was talking in an "intense" manner to a slightly bewildered Bishop.

"It is a prophetic instinct, nothing more."

"I will have a prophetic instinct, too, then," said Hugh, helping himself at last to the dish which was presented to him, to Rachel's relief. "I shall give you the—" looking slowly down the table.

"The Bishop?"

"Certainly not, after your disposal of me."

"Well, then, the poet? I am sure he is a poet because his tie is uneven and his hair is so long. Why do literary men wear their hair long, and literary women wear it short. I should like the poet."

"You shall not have him," said Hugh, with decision. "I am hesitating between the bald young man with the fat hand and the immense ring and the old professor who is drawing plans on the table-cloth."

"The apostle told me with bated breath that the young man with the ring is Mr. Harvey, the author of Unashamed."

Hugh looked at his plate to conceal his disgust.

There was a pause in the buzz of conversation, and into it fell straightway the voice of the apostle like a brick through a skylight.

"The need of the present age is the realization of our brotherhood with sin and suffering and poverty. West London in satin and diamonds does not hear her sister East London in rags calling to her to deliver her. The voice of East London has been drowned in the dance-music of the West End."

Sybell gazed with awed admiration at the apostle.

"What a beautiful thought," she said.

"Miss Gresley's Idyll of East London," said Hugh, "is a voice which, at any rate, has been fully heard."

The apostle put up a pince-nez on a bone leg and looked at Hugh.

"I entirely disapprove of that little book," she said. "It is misleading and wilfully one-sided."

"Hester Gresley is a dear friend of mine," said Sybell, "and I must stand up for her. She is the sister of our clergyman, who is a very clever man. In fact, I am not sure he isn't the cleverest of the two. She and I have great talks. We have so much in common. How strange it seems that she who lives in the depths of the country should have written a story of the East End!"

"That is always so," said the author of Unashamed, in a sonorous voice. "The novel has of late been dwarfed to the scope of the young English girl"—he pronounced it gurl—"who writes from her imagination and not from her experience. What true art requires of us is a faithful rendering of a great experience."

He looked round, as if challenging the world to say that Unashamed was not a lurid personal reminiscence.

Sybell was charmed. She felt that none of her previous dinner-parties had reached such a high level as this one.

"A faithful rendering of a great experience," she repeated. "How I wish Hester were here to hear that. I often tell her she ought to see life, and cultivated society would do so much for her. I found her out a year ago, and I'm always begging people to read her book, and I simply long to introduce her to clever people and oblige the world to recognize her talent."

"I agree with you, it is not yet fully recognized," said Hugh, in a level voice; "but if The Idyll received only partial recognition, it was, at any rate, enthusiastic. And it is not forgotten."

Sybell felt vaguely uncomfortable, and conceived a faint dislike of Hugh as an uncongenial person.

The apostle and the poet began to speak simultaneously, but the female key was the highest, and prevailed.

"We all agree in admiring Miss Gresley's delicate piece of workmanship," said the apostle, both elbows on the table after the manner of her kind, "but it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering humanity—to our cause—when the books which pretend to set forth certain phases of its existence are written by persons entirely ignorant of the life they describe."

"How true!" said Sybell. "I have often thought it, but I never could put it into words as you do. Oh! how I agree with you and Mr. Harvey! As I often say to Hester, 'How can you describe anything if you don't go anywhere or see anything? I can't give you my experience. No one can.' I said that to her only a month ago, when she refused to come up to London with me."

Rachel's white face and neck had taken on them the pink transparent color that generally dwelt only in the curves of her small ears.

"Why do you think Miss Gresley is ignorant of the life she describes?" she said, addressing the apostle.

The author and the apostle both opened their mouths at the same moment, only to register a second triumph of the female tongue.

Miss Barker was in her element. The whole table was listening. She shrugged her orange-velvet shoulders.

"Those who have cast in their lot with the poor," she said, sententiously, "would recognize at once the impossibility of Miss Gresley's characters and situations."

"To me they seem real," said Rachel.

"Ah, my dear Miss West, you will excuse me, but a young lady like yourself, nursed in the lap of luxury, can hardly be expected to look at life with the same eyes as a poor waif like myself, who has penetrated to the very core of the city, and who has heard the stifled sigh of a vast perishing humanity."

"I lived in the midst of it for six years," said Rachel. "I did not cast in my lot with the poor, for I was one of them, and earned my bread among them. Miss Gresley's book may not be palatable in some respects, the district visitor and the woman missionary are certainly treated with harshness, but, as far as my experience goes, The Idyll is a true word from first to last."

There was in Rachel's voice a restrained force that vaguely stirred all the occupants of the