in her place, for which she had no sound qualification.

So the morning wore on, and the pile of letters grew, and Mary felt,
at last, that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of
nerves which fell over England, and one of these days, when she
touched the heart of the system, would begin feeling and rushing
together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks
--for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work, when
her brain had been heated by three hours of application.

Shortly before one o'clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from
their labors, and the old joke about luncheon, which came out
regularly at this hour, was repeated with scarcely any variation of
words. Mr. Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant; Mrs. Seal
brought sandwiches, which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell
Square; while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment,
upholstered in red plush, near by, where, much to the vegetarian's
disapproval, you could buy steak, two inches thick, or a roast section
of fowl, swimming in a pewter dish.

"The bare branches against the sky do one so much GOOD," Mrs. Seal
asserted, looking out into the Square.

"But one can't lunch off trees, Sally," said Mary.

"I confess I don't know how you manage it, Miss Datchet," Mr. Clacton
remarked. "I should sleep all the afternoon, I know, if I took a heavy
meal in the middle of the day."

"What's the very latest thing in literature?" Mary asked, good-