"If I can't persuade you----" she answered listlessly. Her gaiety had deserted her, and there was weariness in her attitude as she drooped by the mantelshelf; her air, her movements, had a languor now. She put out her bare hand slowly, and Kent's clung to it. He stood holding her hand in a pause.... "I can't leave you," said Kent. CHAPTER XXIII It was a little less than a fortnight after the dinner at Richmond that Kent brought Mrs. Deane-Pitt the ten-thousand-word story that she had wanted, and, like the two earliest stories that he had written for her, it was work to which he would have been glad to see his own name attached. He had promised to let her have half a dozen short stories as soon after its completion as possible, and it was his delight to surprise her by the versatility, as well as the originality, of the invention that he displayed in these. In one he wrote an idyll; in another a gruesome little sketch, bound to attract attention by its weirdness; in a third he seemed to be running through the stalest of devices towards the most commonplace of conclusions, until, lo! in the last half-column there came a literary thunder-clap, and this story was even more startling than its predecessors. But all the links fitted, if a reader liked to take the trouble to look back, and the tragedy had been foreshadowed from the beginning. The tales tickled the fancy of the Editor for whom they were intended. They tickled it so much that he asked Mrs. Deane-Pitt to contribute regularly for a few months; and the lady accepting the compliment and the invitation, Kent continued to supply _The Society Mirror_ with an idyll, or a tragedy, or a comedy every week, astonished at his own fecundity. It was amazing how his hand was emboldened, I his imagination stimulated, by the knowledge that his work was accepted before it was penned. There were weeks during which he turned out a story for Mrs. Deane-Pitt nearly every day. All the stories were built upon more or less brilliant ideas, each of them was noteworthy and distinctive when it appeared in _The Society Mirror_ or elsewhere; and if his share of the swindle had been punctiliously paid to him now, he would have been making a good deal of money. Even as it was, he was making it in a sense, for his partner always credited him with the sums that were not forthcoming--entering them in an oxidised silver memorandum-book that she kept in one of the drawers of her desk. When he said that it did not matter about that, she laughingly told him not to be a fool.