As a matter of fact, the Editor, thinking that her name would be a draw just now, had offered Lady Cornwallis a hundred pounds for a tale to run through three numbers. Lady Cornwallis, who had never tried to write anything more elaborate than a love-letter in her life, and who was being dunned to desperation for an account at a livery-stable, had gone to Mrs. Deane-Pitt to do it for her. Mrs. Deane-Pitt, who wrote much less quickly than she pretended, had relegated the duty to Kent. It was a literary house-that-Jack-built. Lady Cornwallis, fearing that her friend might ascertain how much the Editor paid, had ingenuously halved the sum with her; Mrs. Deane-Pitt, confident that the young man would be unable to ascertain, had given to him ten pounds. At the details of the transaction Kent could only guess, as he sat staring at his work while his coffee got cold; but the evolution of the story, perpetrated in a Soho attic for ten pounds, and published as Lady Cornwallis's at the cost of a hundred, was interesting. He was fiercely and inconsistently resentful. In one way it mattered nothing to him. Since his stuff wasn't printed over his own name, it was unimportant over whose name it appeared. But the perception did not lessen his angry sense of having been duped. He remembered the circumstances in which he had written this tale and the lies that Eva had told him about it. Was he to become the ghost of every impostor in London? Though he did not refer to the discovery that he had made, it lent a firmness to his tone when he informed her that his book was accepted and that he was going down to the country to devote a year to another. She heard him without remonstrance. Whatever her faults, she had the virtue of being a woman of the world, and she did not endow the parting, for which she was partially prepared, with any tactless tragedy. For an instant only, recalling the benefit of histrionics at Richmond, she considered the feasibility of sentiment begetting a reconciliation; then she dismissed the idea. The man was remorseful --not of having become estranged from her, but of having succumbed--and sentiment would be wasted to-day. Besides, it would make the interview painful for him, and she didn't care for him half enough to be eager to give him a bad time. She shrugged her shoulders. "Everything has an end," she said languidly--"even _Daniel Deronda_. I owe you a lot of money, by-the-by. I'm afraid I can't square accounts with you at the moment, but I suppose you don't mind trusting me?" "You owe me nothing," said Kent. "If my boorishness has left any liking for me possible, let me have the pleasure of feeling that I did you one or two trifling services."