That passed. He reflected that with two hundred pounds in his pocket he would be able to sit down to another novel on his own account; he might be luckier with that than with _The Eye of the Beholder_. What were a few weeks compared with two hundred pounds? Mrs. Deane-Pitt must have thought him a fool to hesitate. Practical herself, indeed! But--well, for all that, it was rather fascinating to feel that so intimate a confidence was going to subsist between them! She had been a trifle nervous, too, as she took that cigarette; he hoped he hadn't been a prig. She was very nice; it distressed him to think that she had been afraid of him even for a second. Two hundred pounds? He wondered what share it was--half, or more than half, or less. With a woman, however, he could not go into that. His admission that five guineas seemed a lot to him for a three-thousand-word story had probably been injudicious--and it must have made him sound very ignorant besides. Well, that couldn't be helped. And he would be glad if the partnership paid her well; whatever terms she obtained, she must be perfectly aware that her offer was a liberal one to a man in his position, and he was grateful to her. He felt it again--she had been "nice." He began to revolve a plot for the first of the stories, and by the time he reached home he had vaguely thought of one. When Turquand came in, it had shaped. Saying that he had work to do, Kent left him, and went upstairs. He drew a chair to the table, and sat down and wrote--slowly, painfully. The man was an artist, and he could not help the care he took. He sneered at himself for it. Mrs. Deane-Pitt had impressed on him that anything would do, and here he was meditating and revising as if it were a story to submit to the most exclusive of the magazines in his own name. He dashed his pen in the ink, and threw a paragraph on the paper. But he could not go on. His consciousness of that slip-shod paragraph higher up clogged his invention, so that he had to go back to it and put it right. Presently a touch of cheerfulness crept into his mood. That was well said. Yes, she would praise that! The pride of authorship possessed him; he wrote with pleasure; and at two o'clock, when a third of the tale was achieved, he went to bed feeling exhilarated.