"After all, that passage is thundering good, you know," Harry Lessingham announced, as though arguing with himself, arguing himself out of that same invidious chill, an hour later. Arabella had refused a hansom, declaring herself excited, still under the spell, and so wanting to walk. Leaving the Church Street house, the three of us crossed into Campden Grove, with a view to turning down Campden House Road, thus reaching Kensington High Street. "It was out of sight of the average--packed with epigram; worthy of all we've ever believed or asked of him. It takes a master of technique, of style, to write like that." "Beloved brother, which of us ever said it didn't?" Arabella took him up sweetly. Slender, light-footed, the train of her evening gown switched over her arm, beneath her flowing orange and white-flowered satin cloak, she walked between us. "Why, it was good to the point of being inevitable. One seemed--I certainly did--to know every phrase, every word which was coming. None could have been other, or been placed otherwise than it was--and that's the highest praise one can give to anybody's prose, isn't it? One jumped to the perfect rightness of the whole--a rightness so perfect as to make the sentences sound quite extraordinarily familiar." This last assertion dropped as a bomb between Lessingham and myself. "By the way," the girl presently said, as our awkward silence continued, "has either of you happened to read, or re-read, Meredith's 'Egoist' just lately?" Lessingham stopped short, and in the light of a neighbouring gas-lamp I saw his handsome, boyish face look troubled to the point of physical pain. "What on earth are you driving at? What do you mean, Arabella--that Pogson is a plagiarist?" "Don't eat me, Harry dearest, if I incline to use a shorter, commoner expression." "A thief?" "An unconscious one, no doubt," she threw off quickly, fearful of explosions, possibly, in her turn. "He may have been betrayed by his own extraordinary memory." "But this is horrible, horrible," Lessingham cried. "All the names, though, were different." Arabella appeared to have overcome her fear of explosions. Her charming eyes again danced. "Exactly," she said. "That was the peculiar part of it, the thing which riveted my attention. He had--I mean the names of the characters and places were different--were altered, changed." Lessingham stood bare-headed in the light of a gas-lamp. He ran the fingers of his left hand through his crisp fair hair, rumpling it up into a distracted crest. I could see, could almost hear, the travail of his honest soul. Loyalty, faith and honour worked at high pressure to hit on a satisfactory explanation. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.