on.

"Oh, don't go!" Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which
made his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of
another. She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not
unsociably, passed back into the house. She had made an impression
which remained till the other party to the conversation reached the
railway-station, when it was superseded by the thought of his
prospective discussion with Mr. Locket. This was a proof of the
intensity of that interest.

The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter
Baron, who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm. He
had had the question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a flutter
which ought to have been a sense of triumph and which indeed at first
he succeeded in regarding in this light. Mr. Locket had had to admit
that there was an idea in his story, and that was a tribute which
Baron was in a position to make the most of. But there was also a
scene which scandalised the editorial conscience and which the young
man had promised to rewrite. The idea that Mr. Locket had been so
good as to disengage depended for clearness mainly on this scene; so
it was easy to see his objection was perverse. This inference was
probably a part of the joy in which Peter Baron walked as he carried
home a contribution it pleased him to classify as accepted. He
walked to work off his excitement and to think in what manner he
should reconstruct. He went some distance without settling that
point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked vaguely into
shop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived in the depths
of Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and Baron took his
way homeward along the King's Road. There was a new amusement for