astonished to hear that Mrs Edmund Yule had but a small income,
and that she was often put to desperate expedients to keep up the
gloss of easy circumstances. In the gauzy and fluffy and varnishy
little drawing-room Reardon found a youngish gentleman already in
conversation with the widow and her daughter. This proved to be
one Mr Jasper Milvain, also a man of letters. Mr Milvain was glad
to meet Reardon, whose books he had read with decided interest.

'Really,' exclaimed Mrs Yule, 'I don't know how it is that we
have had to wait so long for the pleasure of knowing you, Mr
Reardon. If John were not so selfish he would have allowed us a
share in your acquaintance long ago.'

Ten weeks thereafter, Miss Yule became Mrs Reardon.

It was a time of frantic exultation with the poor fellow. He had
always regarded the winning of a beautiful and intellectual wife
as the crown of a successful literary career, but he had not
dared to hope that such a triumph would be his. Life had been too
hard with him on the whole. He, who hungered for sympathy, who
thought of a woman's love as the prize of mortals supremely
blessed, had spent the fresh years of his youth in monkish
solitude. Now of a sudden came friends and flattery, ay, and love
itself. He was rapt to the seventh heaven.

Indeed, it seemed that the girl loved him. She knew that he had
but a hundred pounds or so left over from that little
inheritance, that his books sold for a trifle, that he had no
wealthy relatives from whom he could expect anything; yet she
hesitated not a moment when he asked her to marry him.