and the book would close with a “first kiss,” followed closely by six or eight pages of advertisements of other publications of Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick. I mention the latter to show how thoroughly realistic Harley was. He thought out his books so truly and so fully before he sat down to write them that he seemed to see each written, printed, made and bound before him, a concrete thing from cover to cover. Besides Osborne and Balderstone and Miss Andrews—of whom I shall at this time not speak at length, since the balance of this little narrative is to be devoted to the setting forth of her peculiarities and charms—there were a number of minor characters, not so necessary to the story perhaps as they might have been, but interesting enough in their way, and very well calculated to provide the material needed for the filling out of the required number of pages. Furthermore, they completed the picture. “I don’t want to put in three vivid figures, and leave the reader to imagine that the rest of the world has been wiped out of existence,” said Harley, as he talked it over with me. “That is not art. There should be three types of character in every book—the positive, the average, and the negative. In that way you grade your story off into the rest of the world, and your reader feels that while he may never have met the positive characters, he has met the average or the negative, or both, and is therefore by one of these links connected with the others, and that gives him a personal interest in the story; and it’s the reader’s personal interest that the writer is after.” So Miss Andrews was provided with a very conventional aunt—the kind of woman you meet with everywhere; most frequently in church squabbles and hotel parlors, however. Mrs. Corwin was this lady’s name, and she was to enact the rôle of chaperon to Miss Andrews. With Mrs. Corwin, by force of circumstances, came a pair of twin children, like those in the _Heavenly Twins_, only more real, and not so Sarah Grandiose in their manners and wit. These persons Harley booked for the steamship _New York_, sailing from New York City for Southampton on the third day of July, 1895. The action was to open at that time, and Marguerite Andrews was to meet Horace Balderstone on that vessel on the evening of the second day out, with which incident the interest of Harley’s story was to begin. But Harley had counted without his heroine. The rest of his cast were safely stowed away on ship-board and ready for action at the appointed hour, but the heroine _missed the steamer by three minutes_, _and it was all Harley’s own fault_. II A PRELIMINARY TRIAL “_I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool_ _To shake the head_, _relent_, _and sigh_, _and yield_.” —“Merchant of Venice.”