"Come on," he shouted, plunging down the hill, "I want to write. Heavens, how I want to write! Ursula, I shall read it to you bit by bit. And you shall paint a picture of it. We'll do it together. 'The Beggar-Man.' Shall we?" "Rather. Begin to-day. Come and read to me to-night." "You don't mind?" He stopped again abruptly. "Mind? Of course not. What a boy!" "Then we're real friends, are we?" "Of course," said Ursula. "I saw that last night." (3) Thus, veritably, was born "The Beggar-Man." The general public knew nothing of it till the play was staged, more than twelve months later, after the usual intolerable delays and the appearance of the author's second book of verse, and then, for all the interest it aroused in this new author, and for all the heavy bookings, few ever knew the details of its origin and working out. It was, as staged, a children's mystery. They loved the Beggar-Man, and shouted with glee at his gay sallies and his new-born wonderment in wooden stools, his rickety hut and the weeds about his door. They loved his adventure with the King, the stupid old King who was as blind as--as a beggar-man. But grown-up people went, too, and they smiled a little wistfully when the children laughed, and looked a little sadly at glittering Herod. It was not a biblical play in a sense, and yet, as a critic said, it was a chapter or two of St. John's gospel that had not previously been written. As to Paul, in these days, that Beggar-Man moved into Fordham Manor and lived with him. He and the boy became inseparables. He inspired a thousand songs that did not mention his name, but he related incidents and preached parables that Paul would retail as wholly his own. Ursula was their confidante. Mrs. Manning, at first bewildered, at length perforce tolerant, got used to the arrival of Paul on a morning breathless from a race across the park. "Good-morning, Mrs. Manning," he would shout, "where's Ursula?" "Good-morning," she would say. "In the studio, painting." "I'll go up, if I may," he would reply, and dash up the stairs. Ursula, at her easel, would smile gravely and call "Come in" almost before he knocked. "Oh, I say," Paul would cry gaily, "what do you think the Beggar-Man told me last night? He says that, after the cure, he went off to his house without his stick. Without his stick. He could hardly believe so simple a thing as that as he went, but it was true. For the first time, then, he saw his home--a poor enough shanty, but his own home, that he saw for the first time. He was still rubbing the tears out of his eyes, when there came a knock at the door. "He opened it. "'Excuse me,' said the man without, trembling with eagerness, 'but is there any more of that clay? I don't want all yours, of course, only just a little.... Or if you could tell me where to get it....'