author and Panoukian, he was not sure but Panoukian was the greater fool. However, extending his indulgence from one to the other, he let the young man talk his fill, and said nothing. He had begun to treasure silence. He loved the silent evenings in Gray's Inn, where he could sit and smoke and chuckle over the world's absurdity, and ponder the ways of men so variously revealed to him in the last few years, and gloat over his own happiness and dream of the days when Matilda should have come to the full bloom of her nature and they would perfectly understand each other, and then life would be a full creation, as full and varied, as largely moving as the passing of the seasons. He had delightful dreams of the time when she would fully share his silence, the immense region beyond words. He was full of happiness, gummy with it, like a plum ripe for plucking--or falling. In his fullness of living--the very top, he told himself, of his age, of a man's life--he found it easy to cover paper with his thoughts and memories, delightful and easy to mold them into form, and to amuse himself he began a work which he called "Out of Bounds," half treatise, half satire on education, dry, humorous, mocking, in which he drew a picture of the members of his old profession engaged in hacking down the imaginations of children and feeding the barren stumps of their minds with the sawdust of the conventional curricula. He was very zestful in this employment, perfectly content that Matilda should be even less demonstrative than before, telling himself that she was wrestling with the after effects of her crisis and would turn to him and his affection when she needed them. He made rapid progress with his work. "Lossie Loses" came to an end at last, and he counted the spoils. He had gained many thousands of pounds--(the play was still running in America)--a few amusing acquaintances, a career for his wife, and an insight into the workings of London's work and pleasure which he would have found it hard to come by otherwise. He chuckled over it all and flung himself with fresh ardor into his work. After the hundredth performance of her play Matilda declared that she was tired, and wanted a rest, and she threw up her part. She came to him and said she wished to go away. "Very well. Where shall we go?" "I want to go alone." And she waited as though she expected a protest from him. For a moment she gazed at him almost with pleading in her eyes, and then she governed herself, stood before him almost assertively and repeated: "Alone." In the aggression he felt the strain in her and told himself she was wanting to get away from him, to break the habit of their life, to come back to him fresh, to advance toward him, reach up to the prize he held in his hands. He told himself that to break in upon her diffidence might only be to thicken the wall she--(he said it was she)--had raised between them. He said: "Won't you mind?" "No. I want to be alone."