"She has, indeed!" said Miss Leigh, with pride sparkling in her
tender eyes--"When she came here, and suddenly decided to stay
with me, I had no idea of her plans, or what she was studying. She
used to shut herself up all the morning and write--she told me she
was finishing off some work--in fact it was her first book,--a
manuscript she brought with her from the country in that famous
satchel! I knew nothing at all about it till she confided to me
one day that she had written a book, and that it had been accepted
by a publisher. I was amazed!"

"And the result must have amazed you still more," said
Harrington,--"but I'm a very astute person!--and I guessed at
once, when I was told the address of the 'PRIVATE SECRETARY of the
author,' that the SECRETARY was the author herself!"

Innocent blushed.

"Perhaps it was wrong to say what was not true," she said, "but
really I WAS and AM the secretary of the author!--I write all the
manuscript with my own hand!"

They laughed at this, and then Harrington went on to say--

"I believe you know the painter Amadis Jocelyn, don't you? Yes?
Well, I was with him the other day, and I said you were the author
of the wonderful book. He told me I was talking nonsense--that you
couldn't be,--he had met you at an artist's evening party and that
you had told him a story about some ancestor of his own family.
'She's a nice little thing with baby eyes,' he said, 'but she
couldn't write a clever book! She may have got some man to write