There were moments when Wolff Mason realised that the one-sided game of letters has a bad effect on the argumentative side of a man's mind. The present was one. He looked again at his watch, and replaced it very hurriedly in his waistcoat pocket. "My dear, I really must be going." "One minute more--just one," pleaded Mrs. Mason, and her voice was as soft as ever it had been thirty years ago. "I want your hand, Wolff!" The novelist came round to the bedside and sat down for a few moments on the edge. During those few moments two frail, worn, thin hands were joined together, and Wolff Mason's spectacles showed him a moisture in his wife's eyes--not tears, but a shining film which only made them more lovely and sweet and kind. That film had come over them in the old days when they were both young and he had told her of his love. On very rare occasions he had described it in the eyes of his dark-eyed heroines, and never without a hotness in his own. He rose suddenly. His hand was pressed. "You will reconsider it, Wolff?" "My dear, she is our last." "My love, we have each other!" Some moments later, when Wolff Mason had closed the door behind him, he had to open it again to hear what it was that his wife was calling after him. "Mind you don't make the general _too_ inhuman, Wolff, or I shall be so disappointed in you both!" The novelist laughed. So did his wife. The secret of their complete happiness was not love alone. It was love and laughter. Nevertheless, Wolff Mason drove to the office of the _Mayfair Magazine_ in a less literary frame of mind than he either liked or was addicted to at this early hour of the day. It is not true that the novelist constructed all his stories in the hansom which deposited him in Paternoster Row at a quarter to ten every morning, and in front of his own door at a quarter-past seven in the evening. That was the invention of the lady journalists who wrote paragraphs about Wolff Mason for the evening papers--those paragraphs his old-world soul abhorred. It is a fact, however, that he liked to get out of his hansom with more ideas than he had taken into it. He made it a rule to think only of his work on the drive in. But this morning he was breaking all his rules: he had cut himself with his razor; he had left the house five minutes late, owing to a series of little domestic scenes of which his head was still full. And how he hated scenes outside his books! He treated the psychological moments in his own life as lightly, indeed, as in his novels, but the former worried him. This morning he had kissed Mrs. Mason with all the exuberance of a young man, and on coming downstairs, and finding Ida waiting for him with his tall hat and overcoat nicely brushed, and his gloves warmed on both sides, he had kissed her too, and so fondly as to bring out the same film on her sweet eyes as he had produced a few minutes before in those of her mother.