While Laurence Desmond was dreaming lazily of the future, lingering over his midnight cigar in Temple chambers--nearer the chimney pots than the handsome rooms he afterwards occupied--Philip Jerningham took it into his head to die suddenly, and Emily came to London with a letter to her cousin ever-so-many-times-removed, the irresistible Harold. By one of those insignificant accidents which make the links in the great chain of destiny, it happened that the announcement of Philip Jerningham’s death escaped the eye of Emily’s undeclared admirer. It was not to be expected that a bereaved daughter, who was left very desolate and helpless, could write ceremonious notes to all her late father’s masculine acquaintance; and Emily had the Jerningham pride, and, for some unknown reason, was peculiarly inclined to be resentful of small offences where Laurence Desmond was concerned. So the editor went on smoking his midnight cigars, and pushing on steadily towards the achievement of the indispensable income; deferring week after week and month after month the Parisian holiday which he was always promising himself. The time drifted by him with that imperceptible progress which is so peculiar to time when a man is always wrestling with the arrears of his labour, and trying to get seventy minutes out of an hour. Time puts on a special pair of wings for the slave who fills a waste-paper basket and uses half-a-crown’s worth of postage-stamps every day of his life except Sunday, and who sits under a popular preacher on that day, weighed down by the consciousness of a hundred unanswered letters, and the knowledge that a hundred offended correspondents are swelling with indignation because of his neglect. Mr. Desmond was roughly awakened from his pleasant day-dreams one morning on reading the announcement of Harold Jerningham’s marriage. The blow was a severe one, and for some days the writer’s arguments were rather weak and inconsequential, and the editor’s eye unusually careless of flaws and blemishes in the work of his contributors. Only now that Emily was lost to him did he know how very dear she had been; but even more bitter to Laurence Desmond than the thought of his loss was the idea of his folly. “I fancy myself a man of the world,” he said to himself, “and yet I am the dupe of masculine fatuity which would be contemptible in a stripling newly escaped from the university. I thought she loved me; I thought her love was as entirely my own as if I had received the assurance of it in the plainest words that were ever spoken.”