time."

"Oh!" murmured Sewell sympathetically. "Well! I ought to have told
you at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing
acceptable work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you
ever expected to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious
purpose,--for anything but your own pleasure and entertainment,--I
should certainly have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens
of the long poem you have sent me give me even less reason to
encourage you than the things you read me at home."

Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker's air-castles to break
the silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words;
but nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see,
Barker remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled
Sewell a little to see him apparently so besotted in his own
conceit, and he added: "But I think I had better not ask you to rely
altogether upon my opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to
a publisher, and you can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a
moment."

He left the room and went slowly upstairs to his wife. It appeared
to him a very short journey to the third story, where he knew she
was decking the guest-chamber for the visit of a friend whom they
expected that evening. He imagined himself saying to her when his
trial was well over that he did not see why she complained of those
stairs; that he thought they were nothing at all. But this sense of
the absurdity of the situation which played upon the surface of his
distress flickered and fled at sight of his wife bustling cheerfully
about, and he was tempted to go down and get Barker out of the