"There is nothing the matter, Charlie; I--I was only trying to think how happy I ought to be," she whispered, with a faint laugh. "Because I thought once--dreamed it, I think--that when love came to me it would be something like the angels one thinks about in childhood--something great and marvellous." "And isn't it?" he asked, quite simply. "I don't know--yet," she replied, disengaging herself from his arms. "Perhaps it's because I haven't had time to think about it." "_I_ didn't need to think about it," he exclaimed. "I knew in a moment." "Yes--but then you're different," she replied. "Let me go now; we'll talk about this--some other time." "But you've said you loved me," he cried, striving to detain her. "I--I think so," she breathed. "Oh--won't you let me get a little used to it?" she asked whimsically, and ran out of the room. Charlie thoughtfully filled a pipe, and lit it, and threw himself back in his easy chair. "Now," he said, as he puffed thoughtfully--"now I shall really have something to work for, when I've made up my mind what's the best work to tackle. Why didn't I think of this before?" CHAPTER VII DREAMS It is highly necessary, having regard to the fact that we have a hero--albeit a doubtful one--that we should not lose sight of him. Jimmy in a sense had almost lost sight of himself for a time, if the expression may be pardoned; lost sight, in fact, of that large personage, James Larrance, who had blossomed forth so well in print at one time. For Jimmy had grown ambitious; and Jimmy had left behind him something of the old safe hack work, and had launched out a little. Fortune had smiled upon him a little to begin with; but he had soon discovered that in this more ambitious work editors were not so reasonable as that young man in the shirt-sleeves had once been, nor so ready to give advice and assistance. When the money did come in, it came in, as Jimmy would have expressed it, "in lumps"; but then the lumps were few and far between, and a man might well starve while he was waiting for the next lump to come to him. Jimmy almost starved, with some amount of cheerfulness; but he went on. For Jimmy had a way of setting his teeth, and going at the work in a bullet-headed fashion--and coming up whenever he was knocked down, and going at it again. Which was highly serviceable in the long run. Also--wonder of wonders!--Jimmy had contrived, in the interval of work of a smaller order, to write a novel; a novel that always reminded him in after days of a cold room, and a lamp that smoked, and the collar of an overcoat scraping his ears; because those were the conditions under which it was produced. It was a blessed relaxation that Jimmy promised himself during each long day; a something to be tenderly brought forth at night, and gone over lovingly; something that was in an indefinite fashion to make his fortune, in a surprising way, immediately on its publication.