These were days of almost breathless anticipation for Jane. Christiansen was taking her to his publisher friend on the unfortunate occasion when they had encountered Jerry. The book had been in the firm's hands ever since. It seemed to Jane an eternity, in which she had not even Christiansen's encouragement, for he had disappeared on one of his frequent absences. He was at the sanatorium with his wife, Jane supposed. She went to her desk, in the white room, every morning, just the same, working over the notes for a new story which had been knocking at the door of her brain for a long time. The theme had sprung full-armed, as it were, from some remark of a character in the other book; she found that it had been developing all the time since its inception in that busy forge, the subconscious mind! The central character was a woman of a type unfamiliar to Jane, and yet, in the necromancy of imagination, she found she knew this girl like a twin soul. How she looked, what she thought, how she felt--it was all there in Jane's consciousness. It kept her mind off the fate of the other book to work at this new one. So she began it. Her habit of work stood her in good stead, and during her morning hours she actually forgot that her chance was being cast in a publishing house, on the Avenue, by a group of men she had never seen. Sometimes she despaired, other times she had full confidence. But if it came to pass that she should find a publisher and an audience--that she should be permitted to make, as her contribution, these transcriptions of life which joyed her so in the doing--could she ask one thing more of the gods? The envelope with the imprint of the arbiters of her fate was brought her by Anna one afternoon as she sat in the nursery! Jerry was out and the house very still. She held the letter in her hand--her heart beating so that she could scarcely breathe. It seemed as if all those years of patient labour stood before her in a row, asking her to read their sentence, yet she did not break the seal. "Baby boy," she said unsteadily to her son, "shall you care whether your mother is a woman of letters? Will you love her as well as 'just mother'?" He smiled his ready smile at her. She made him happy; he was ready to admit that. With an unsteady hand she opened the letter and forced herself to read: "My dear Mrs. Paxton: "We have taken rather more time than usual for the consideration of your book since it is a first book of a new author. We were so anxious that the fact that Martin Christiansen had brought you to us should not influence our judgment, that we subjected your work to a most rigorous examination.