"Oh, will you?"

"Why, certainly! I couldn't take a step like that without the approval
of the house."

"No," Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer's address from
the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he
gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at
least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if
one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper
at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting
evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers. He
recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the
weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary
intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was fairly
stated, but the privacy of the author's correspondent was perfectly
guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian
felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had
betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the
table to his mother with rather a sick look.

After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been
a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had
agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an
author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and
from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since slept
upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking,
and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them,