Into his happy life there broke suddenly the tempestuous form of the Denborough Doctor. He arrived with but a pound or two in his pocket with wild ideas of employment on ultra-Radical newspapers; above all, with the full load of his rage against Dale Bannister, the traitor. He strode up and down the little room, tugging his beard and fiercely denouncing the renegade, while Arthur looked at his troubled eyes and knitted brows, and wondered if his mind were not unhinged. Who could talk like that about Dale, if he were sane? Arthur would have chaffed his friend, laughed at him, ridiculed him, perhaps slyly hinted at the illicit charms of rank and wealth, for which the poet's old mistress mourned deserted. But to speak in hate and rancor! And what was he plotting? But when he heard the plot, his face cleared, and he laughed. "I think you're hard on Dale," he said; "but, after all, it will be a good joke." "Johnstone will do it," exclaimed the Doctor, pausing in his stride. "His shop window will be full of them. He'll have sandwich-men all over the place. Bannister won't be able to go out without being met by his own words--the words he denies. I'll cram them down his throat." Arthur laughed again. "It will be awkward when he's walking with old Delane." "Aye, and with that girl who's got hold of him. He shan't forget what he wrote--nor shall a soul in Denborough either. I'll make his treachery plain, if I spend my last farthing." "When are you going back?" "In a week. It will all be ready in a week. He'll know who did it. Curse him!" "My dear Doctor, aren't you a little----" "Are you like that, too?" burst out Roberts. "Have none of you any sincerity? Is it sham with all of you? You laugh as if it were a joke." "I can't be angry with old Dale. I expect he'll only laugh himself, you know. It will be good fun." Roberts looked at him in hopeless wrath. It seemed to him that these men, who wrote the words and proclaimed the truths which had turned his life and reformed his soul, were themselves but playing with what they taught. Were they only actors--or amusing themselves? "You are as bad as he is," he said angrily, and stalked out of the room. Arthur, puzzled with his unmanageable guest, went down, as he often did, to his neighbors, and laid the whole case before Mrs. Hodge and Nellie Fane. He found them both in, Nellie having just returned from an afternoon concert where she had been singing. "I believe the fellow's half mad, you know," said Arthur. "If he isn't, he ought to be ashamed of himself," said Mrs. Hodge, and she launched on a description of Mrs. Robert's pitiable state. "Well, I don't think that he's got more than five pounds in the world," responded Arthur. "And he's got no chance of making any money. Nobody dares publish what he wants to write." "He used to be pleasant at Littlehill," Nellie remarked, "when we were first there."