"I suppose, Jimmy"--she kept her eyes averted, and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper--"I suppose, Jimmy, you don't think--don't think of those things--eh?" "No--I don't," said Jimmy, after a long look at her. "I am in a sense wedded to my work; I never think of anything else. A man must be free--free to live his life, and do the best that is in him"--Jimmy seemed to have read or heard that somewhere, but it sounded rather well just now. "I cannot see myself ever marrying," he added; yet there was a little bitterness in his heart as he said it, and as he thought of Charlie and of Moira. "I understand," she said; and laughed curiously. "So I shall say what I meant to say all along to Charlie; I shall tell him that I'll marry him. Good-bye, Jimmy!" He took the hand she held out to him; they stood for a moment in the shadows of the room; stood, too, perhaps, for a moment amid the shadows of old memories clustering thick and fast about them. Then he wrung her hand, and turned away. "I hope you'll be very happy, Moira," he said. "Oh--I think so," she replied; and when he turned again from his notes she was gone. Curiously enough he did not touch the notes again that night. He sat for a long time in front of the fire--thinking--thinking; striving to look into that new future which had so suddenly to be rearranged. "I can quite see what is going to happen," he told himself. "I can see myself, in the years that are coming, a man grown successful--and yet not caring very much about the success." (Jimmy was very confident about this point.) "And yet there shall be no bitterness in me; I can feel myself looking at things, sanely, and telling myself that this was, after all, for the best--quite for the best. Poor Moira!" CHAPTER VIII THE SIDES OF THE 'BUSES O! Jimmy had suddenly found himself a personage--in something of a roundabout and accidental fashion. Paragraphs had appeared in newspapers, giving strange accounts of the young dramatist; a photographer had most surprisingly asked for a sitting, for which no charge would be made, and in regard to which certain copies of the photograph were actually to be presented to Jimmy; and many other things had happened. So far as the actual play was concerned, matters had not gone so smoothly as might at first have been anticipated. The synopsis, to begin with, seemed to puzzle Mr. Bennett Godsby not a little; he suggested that he "couldn't see himself in it." Jimmy waited a little hopelessly at the theatre on several evenings; had messages sent out to him by the great man, declaring that the great man was changing--or absolutely worn out--or that he hadn't had time to think about the matter. Finally, one night Jimmy received a note, requesting him to call and see Mr. Bennett Godsby at his house on the following morning.