The only persons to whom he had confided his intention were Hilary Vickars and Mrs. Bundy. Immediately after the midnight interview with his mother he had gone to Vickars, who listened to his story in grave silence. How every detail of that hour passed with Hilary Vickars stood out in his memory! He could see the face of Vickars, pale and eager, as it bent toward him; he remembered how he noted that the lock of hair that fell across his forehead was newly streaked with gray, and how the veins in the long thin hands showed every intricate reticulation. He recollected how he watched a little patch of sunlight as it crept across the floor, saying to himself with a kind of childish irrelevance, "When it touches the wainscot, I must go." And what length of years or gulfs of immense vicissitude could obliterate the face of Elizabeth, as he saw it through that difficult hour--so pale, so sweet, so intense, her lips parted in surprise, her eyes signalling to him messages of faith and constancy? "You are doing right," said Vickars, and he had laid the long, blue-veined hand upon his head in benediction; and then Elizabeth had taken Arthur's hand in hers, and kissed it softly, and held it for a moment to her bosom--and both acts had been done so solemnly that they seemed like sacred rites in a religious ceremony. When he rose to go--it was in the exact moment when the patch of sunlight touched the wainscot--Vickars had offered him some practical advice. "I wish I could help you," he said. "Let me see, it's New York you're going to, isn't it?" "Yes--New York." "Well, there's a man there I know slightly--I met him once over a negotiation for book rights in the States. He had an odd name--probably that's why I remember him--Wilbur Meredith Legion, and he seemed to be a decent fellow. It won't do you any harm to have an introduction to him." From a pigeon-hole in his desk Vickars produced a card: "Mr. Wilbur Meredith Legion, Vermont Building, Broadway, New York. Literary and Press Agent." "You'll find him interesting, at all events," said Vickars, "and he may be able to put you in the way of using your pen." From Lonsdale Road Arthur had gone to Mrs. Bundy's. That redoubtable woman at once rose to the occasion, and indulged herself in a flight of prophecy which would have done credit to the wildest programmes of Mr. Bundy. "You'll make your fortune before you're thirty," she exclaimed. "Think of Carnegie." And thereupon she poured forth a stream of exhilarating and incorrect information, which sounded strangely like excerpts from Bundy's prospectuses, so that it seemed as though a conjurer flung a dozen golden balls of sudden wealth into the air, and kept them flashing and gyrating for some seconds with amazing ingenuity. "Stop!--stop!" said Arthur, laughing. "Not a bit of it," she replied. "I only wish you could meet Bundy. He'd be the man to help you." "Where is Mr. Bundy just now?"