“The pursuit of unprotected females is also, doubtless, conducive to an active state of body.” “This may be pleasantry--” “While a murderous assault or so on a few trusting old gentlemen might help to take something out of you.” Mr Wyllie uttered an exclamation, half rose, and sank down again with a flabby smile. “I would merely suggest St. Niklaus in the Zermatt Valley as a suitable headquarters to such operations,” said Gilead. “Do you know the place at all?” His companion shook his head. “This humour, young gentleman,” he said, “is, I presume, of the new order. I confess it is beyond my perhaps old-fashioned understanding.” His tone was extremely lofty and courteous, but he appeared, in spite of it, to wax suddenly very wroth. “What did you mean, sir,” he cried, “by your allusion to unprotected females?” “I refer you to your own conscience, sir,” answered Gilead, as loftily. “My conscience, sir,” said the stranger, “acquits me of any but the most consistently chivalrous attitude, the most respectful, the most diffident even towards the sex.” “Then to what,” said Gilead, aghast before this enormous dissembling, “do you attribute its burden, which corresponds, by your own confession, with that upon your bones?” “Now is this depravity or innocence,” cried the stranger, apostrophising space, “that can discover no pretext for self-reproach in any courses but those of libertinism?” He faced about on his stool, puffing and gasping: “I owe it to myself; I owe it more to the spotless fame of another,” he said, “that this gross slander should not pass unrefuted. You appear to be a reader, sir. Tell me, have you ever read ‘Night-Lights’?” “No,” said Gilead, astonished. “‘The Glow-worm in the Grass’?” “No.” “‘The Evanescence of Evadne’?” “No.” The stranger, with a supreme effort, sat up. “A reader!” he exclaimed scornfully--“a reader! And you will be telling me next, I suppose, that you have never even heard of Cornelia Cox!” “I am bound to confess that I never have,” said Gilead. The stranger smacked his bill-hook into the block before him, and, with a mighty struggle, got to his feet. “What?” he cried hoarsely: “Cornelia, the one, the peerless, the incomparable, the first novelist of her age--and he does not even know her name! O, in what nethermost depths of darkness is not the philistine of our generation capable of enclosing himself! Not to have heard of Cornelia Cox!” “Sir,” said Gilead, rising, nettled, in his turn, and moved to an instant resolution. “I am sorry that my ignorance offends you. But though I am uninformed as to the lady’s name and works, I can claim some knowledge of another romancer which may both startle and disturb you. I allude, sir, to Mr Winsom Wyllie.” “Well,” said the stranger, for the first time coolly--“what of him? _I_ did not write the book, nor, I trust, are you presuming to attribute its authorship to Miss Cox?” “Book? Authorship?” cried Gilead, staring.