“Mr. Harley has seen clearly from the outset what it was that he wished to accomplish and how to accomplish it,” the writer observed. “He has swerved neither to the right nor to the left, but has progressed undeviatingly along the lines he has mapped out for himself, and keeping constantly in mind the principles which seemed to him at the beginning of his career to be right. It has been this persistent and consistent adherence to principle that has gained for Mr. Harley his hearing, and which is constantly rendering more certain and permanent his position in the world literary. Others may be led hither and yon by the fads and follies of the scatter-brained, but Realism will ever have one steadfast champion in Stuart Harley.” “Read that,” I said, tossing the journal across the table. He read it, and blushed to the roots of his ears. “This is no time to desert the flag, Harley,” said I, as he read. “Stick to your colors, and let her stick to hers. You’d better be careful how you force your heroine.” “Ha, ha!” he laughed. “I should think so, and for more reasons than one. I never really intended to do horrible things with her, my boy. Trust me, if I do lead her, to lead her gently. My persuasion will be suggestive rather than mandatory.” “And that hero—from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?” I asked, with a smile. “I’d like to see him so much as—tell her the price of anything,” cried Harley. “A man like that has no business to live in the same hemisphere with a woman like Marguerite Andrews. When I threatened her with him I was conversing through a large and elegant though wholly invisible hat.” I breathed more freely. She was still sacred and safe in his hands. Shortly after, dinner over, we left the table, and went to the theatre, where we saw what the programme called the “latest London realistic success,” in which three of the four acts of an intensely exciting melodrama depended upon a woman’s not seeing a large navy revolver, which lay on the table directly before her eyes in the first. The play was full of blood and replete with thunder, and we truly enjoyed it, only Harley would not talk much between the acts. He was unusually moody. After the play was over his tongue loosened, however, and we went to the Players for a supper, and there he burst forth into speech.