She turned her gaze upon the gold and scarlet foliage of the slope below, to leave him free to consider. He was surprised that he hesitated. As an excuse for tea-table frivolity this meeting was well enough; as a business proposition it was ridiculous. But this unaccountable Arabella appealed strongly to his imagination. If he allowed her to escape, if he told her he had answered the advertisement of X Y Z merely in jest, she was quite capable of telling him good-by and slipping away into the nowhere out of which she had come. No--he would not risk losing her; he would multiply opportunities for conferences that he might prolong the delight of seeing her. “I have every confidence,” he said in a moment, “that you can help me. I can tell you in a word the whole of my trouble.” “Very well, if you are quite sure of it,” she replied. “The plain truth about me is,” he said earnestly--and the fear he had known for days showed now in his eyes----“the fact about me is that I’m a dead one! I’ve lost my stroke. To be concrete, I’ve broken down in the third chapter of a book I promised to deliver in January, and I can’t drag it a line further!” “It’s as clear as daylight that you’re in a blue funk,” she remarked. “You’re scared to death. And that will never do! You’ve got to brace up and cheer up! And the first thing I would suggest is----” “Yes, yes!” he whispered eagerly. “Burn those three chapters and every note you’ve made for the book.” “I’ve already burned them forty times!” he replied ruefully. “Burn them again. Then in a week, say, if you follow my advice explicitly, it’s quite likely you’ll find a new story calling you.” “Just waiting won’t do it! I’ve tried that.” “But not under my care,” she reminded him with one of her enthralling smiles. “An eminent writer has declared that there are only nine basic plots known to fiction; the rest are all variations. Let it be our affair to find a new one--something that has never been tried before!” “If you could do that you’d save my reputation. You’d pull me back from the yawning pit of failure!” “Cease firing! You’ve been making hard work of what ought to be the grandest fun in the world. The Quill had a picture of you planted beside a beautiful mahogany desk, waiting to be inspired. There’s not much in this inspiration business. You’ve got to choose some real people, mix them up and let them go to it!” “But,” Farrington frowned, “how are you ever going to get them together? You can’t pick out the interesting people you meet in the street and ask them to work up a plot for you.” “No,” she asserted, “you don’t ask them; you just make them do it. You see”--taking up a cube of sugar and touching it to the tip of her tongue--“every living man and woman, old or young, is bitten with the idea that he or she is made for adventure.” “Rocking-chair heroes,” he retorted, “who’d cry if they got their feet wet going home from church!”