He lighted both of the candles and extinguished the flickering faggot. The steady glow of the candlelight filled the room. On the mantel above the blackened fireplace he saw a small, white framed mirror. A forgotten pair of gloves lay beside it, and two or three hairpins. He picked up the gloves, slapped them against his leg to rid them of accumulated dust, and then stuck them into his coat pocket. They were long and slim and soiled by wear. A closet door, standing partly open, drew him across the room. Hanging from one of the hooks was a moth-eaten vicuna smoking jacket of blue. Beside this garment hung a girl's bright red blazer, with black collar; protecting, business-like paper cuffs were still attached. In the corner of the closet reposed a broom, a mop and an empty pail. He smiled at the thought of young Alix sweeping and scrubbing the floor of this sequestered retreat. Returning to the table, he pulled out the drawer, and there, side by side, lay two neat but far from voluminous manuscripts, each weighted down by the unused portion of the scratch pad from which the written sheets had been torn. One was in the bold, superior scrawl of a boy, the other ineffably feminine in its painstaking regard for legibility and tidiness. III These literary efforts had been cut off short in their infancy. David's vigorously written pages, marred by frequent scratchings and erasures, far outnumbered Alix's. He was in the midst of Chapter Three of a novel entitled "The Phantom Singer" when the calamitous interruption came. Alix's work had progressed to Chapter Five. Inspection revealed the further fact that she was thrifty. She had written on both sides of the sheets, while the prodigal David confined himself to the inexorable "one side of the sheet only." There were unmistakable indications of editorial arrogance on the part of Alix on every sheet of David's manuscript. Her small, precise hand was to be seen here, there and everywhere,--sometimes in the substitution of a single word, often in the rewriting of an entire sentence. But nowhere on her own pages was to be found so much as a scratch by the clumsy hand of her fellow novelist. Her story bore the fetching title: "Lady Mordaunt's Lover."