Looking up, she observed that her usher had disappeared, and in his place was the detested Vertigo. _To be continued--but not here._] * * * * * AT THE GATES OF THE WEST. SCENE--_The New York landing pier of the Ocean Palace Line, crowded with passengers and their luggage from the R.M.S. "Gargantuan."_ TIME--_About five and a-half hours earlier than ours._ _Mr. Horace Rutherford Penfold (the last thing in novelists, surrounded by New York pressmen)_: "Glad to see you, boys! Delighted to see you! _What!_ Was I hiding from you behind my luggage? What an absolutely absurd idea! The whole way across I've been eagerly looking forward to meeting you gentlemen of the most go-ahead, most enlightened Press on earth! Yes, it's my first visit to your great country. The dream of my life is now realised. Yes, of course I'm rejoiced that my novel, _The Love of a Hop-Picker_, has taken its place among the 'best sellers' on this side. Yes, people are good enough to say I've broken quite new ground in making the hop-fields the scene of a novel; the critics say my word-pictures of the hop-poles are 'absolutely luscious'; and they pronounce _Ozias_, the hop-picker, 'a giant of artistic creation.' Yes, my novel is one of the twenty which in the last six months have been called 'epoch-making' and have been said to 'stand quite alone in modern fiction.' No doubt the hop-field will now be exploited by other writers, until in time it will become as hackneyed as the desert. "Yes, this is my first visit to your wonderful country. I am here to superintend the rehearsals of the dramatised form of _The Love of a Hop-Picker._ Naturally I am a little nervous, for to please a New York audience is the playwright's dream of heaven. And then, of course, _The Love of a Hop-Picker_ is not only utterly English in atmosphere, but also peculiarly _Kentish_. Still, with such a brilliantly intelligent, marvellously sympathetic public as yours, I don't despair of bringing the hop-poles over the footlights, so to say. "Yes, gentlemen, I have a wife, and I've not forgotten to bring her sworn affidavit that my coming without her is quite regular and in order, because, though Ellis Island's a delightful place, no doubt, still, I want to go into your great Empire city 'right away,' as you say. Here it is: 'I declare that I, Agatha Mary Rutherford Penfold, and my dear husband, Horace Rutherford Penfold, are a perfectly united and affectionate couple; that his journey to the United States is taken with my entire approval, and that I should have accompanied him but for being an extremely bad sailor and afraid of storms at sea. (Signed) AGATHA MARY RUTHERFORD PENFOLD. Sworn to in the presence of--' and so forth. Yes, certainly, gentlemen, copy it by all means.