But it troubled him a little that she had not let him know what she was
doing.

"Besides," he went on, "you need never know what I think. There are
other reviewers on the 'Battery!'"

"I should recognize your hand anywhere! And more than that, I should
only have to pick out the most rigid and unbending criticism to know
which must be yours. It is your way, and you know it! Are you not always
showing me up to myself! That's why I was in such mortal terror of your
finding out what I was doing. If you had said anything to make me hate
my work," she went on, looking up at him with earnest eyes, "I should
never have touched it again; and I did want to finish it! You have been
my master now for--let me see--how many months? I do not know how I
shall ever thank you!" Here she changed tone. "If I come off with a
pound of flesh left, it will be owing entirely to the pains you have
taken with me! I wonder whether you will like any of my triolets! But it
is time to dress for dinner, so I will leave you in peace--but not all
night, for when you go to bed you shall take _your_ copy with you to
help you asleep."

While dressing he was full of the dread of not liking the book well
enough to praise it as he wished. A first book was nothing, he said to
himself; it might be what it would; but the second--that was another
matter! He recalled what first books he knew. "Poems by Two Brothers"
gave not a foretaste of what was to come so soon after them! Shelley's
prose attempts in his boyhood were below criticism! Byron's "Hours of
Idleness" were as idle as he called them! He knew what followed these
and others, but what had followed Lady Lufa's? That he was now to