A week passed, and then, one Friday morning, a new light burst on me. Miss Liston came into the garden at eleven o'clock and sat down by me on the lawn. Chillington and Pamela had gone riding with the squire, Dora was visiting the poor. We were alone. The appearance of Miss Liston at this hour (usually sacred to the use of the pen), no less than her puzzled look, told me that an obstruction had occurred in the novel. Presently she let me know what it was. "I'm thinking of altering the scheme of my story, Mr. Wynne," said she. "Have you ever noticed how sometimes a man thinks he's in love when he isn't really?" "Such a case sometimes occurs," I acknowledged. "Yes, and he doesn't find out his mistake----" "Till they're married?" "Sometimes, yes," she said, rather as though she were making an unwilling admission. "But sometimes he sees it before--when he meets somebody else." "Very true," said I, with a grave nod. "The false can't stand against the real," pursued Miss Liston; and then she fell into meditative silence. I stole a glance at her face; she was smiling. Was it in the pleasure of literary creation--an artistic ecstasy? I should have liked to answer yes, but I doubted it very much. Without pretending to Miss Liston's powers, I have the little subtlety that is needful to show me that more than one kind of smile may be seen on the human face, and that there is one very different from others; and, finally, that that one is not evoked, as a rule, merely by the evolution of the troublesome encumbrance in pretty writing vulgarly called a "plot." "If," pursued Miss Liston, "someone comes who can appreciate him and draw out what is best in him----" "That's all very well," said I, "but what of the first girl?" "Oh, she's--she can be made shallow, you know; and I can put in a man for her. People needn't be much interested in her." "Yes, you could manage it that way," said I, thinking how Pamela--I took the liberty of using her name for the shallow girl--would like such treatment. "She will really be valuable mainly as a foil," observed Miss Liston; and she added generously, "I shall make her nice, you know, but shallow--not worthy of him." "And what are you going to make the other girl like?" I asked. Miss Liston started slightly; also she colored very slightly, and she answered, looking away from me across the lawn: "I haven't quite made up my mind yet, Mr. Wynne." With the suspicion which this conversation aroused fresh in my mind, it was curious to hear Pamela laugh, as she said to me on the afternoon of the same day: "Aren't Sir Gilbert and Audrey Liston funny? I tell you what, Mr. Wynne, I believe they're writing a novel together." "Perhaps Chillington's giving her the materials for one," I suggested. "I shouldn't think," observed Pamela in her dispassionate way, "that anything very interesting had ever happened to him." "I thought you liked him," I remarked humbly.