In vain did the author asseverate that he was delighted to see her; she rushed away without another word; but that evening she wrote him an ecstatic letter from her dressing-room about what it had meant to her and what it always would mean to her to think of his working like that for her. "But we mustn't deride Janet Bond," said the author to his secretary, who was looking contemptuously at the actress's heavy caligraphy. "We must remember that she will create Joan of Arc." "Yes, it's a pity, isn't it?" Miss Hamilton commented, dryly. "Oh, but won't you allow that she's a great actress?" "I will indeed," she murmured with an emphatic nod. Carried along upon his flood of correspondence John nevertheless managed to steer clear of his relations, and in his present frame of mind he was inclined to attribute his successful course like everything else that was prospering just now to the advent of Miss Hamilton. However, it was too much to expect that with his newly discovered talent he should resist dictating at any rate one epistolary sermon to his youngest brother, of whose arrival at Ambles he had been sharply notified by Hilda. This weighty address took up nearly a whole morning, and when it was finished John was disconcerted by Miss Hamilton's saying: "You don't really want me to type all this out?" "Why not?" "Oh, I don't know. But it seems to me that whatever he's done this won't make him repent. You don't mind my criticizing you?" "I asked you to," he reminded her. "Well, it seems to me a little false--a little, if I may say so, complacently wrathful. It's the sort of thing I seem to remember reading and laughing at in old-fashioned books. Of course, I'll type it out at once if you insist, but it's already after twelve o'clock, and we have to go over the material for the third act. I can't somehow fit in what you've just been dictating with what you were telling me yesterday about the scene between Gilles de Rais and Joan. I'm so afraid that you'll make Joan preach, and of course she mustn't preach, must she?" "All right," conceded John, trying not to appear mortified. "If you think it isn't worth sending, I won't send it." He fancied that she would be moved by his sensitiveness to her judgment; but, without a tremor, she tore the pages out of her shorthand book and threw them into the waste-paper basket. John stared at the ruthless young woman in dismay. "Didn't you mean me to take you at your word?" she asked, severely. He was not altogether sure that he had, but he lacked the courage to tell her so and checked an impulse to rescue his stillborn sermon from the grave. "Though I don't quite like the idea of leaving my brother at Ambles with nothing to occupy his energies," John went on, meditatively, "I'm doubtful of the prudence of exposing him to the temptations of idleness."