"Well, you said you would like to see some of George Sand's novels, which--for me--was just the same. So when I went to London yesterday I managed to borrow it, and there it is." He pointed triumphantly to a yellow-paper-bound volume sticking out of his coat pocket. "Of course you know George Sand is a sort of old Johnnie now; nobody reads her. But that's your affair. Will you have it?" He offered it. The excitement, the wild flush in the girl's face, had subsided. She looked at the book, and at the man holding it out. "What is it?" She stooped to read the title--"Mauprat." "What's it about?" "Some nonsense about a cad tamed by a sentimental young woman." He shrugged his shoulders, "I tried to read it, and couldn't. But they say it's one of her best. If you want it, there it is." She took it reluctantly, and moved on along the downward path, he following, and the dog beside them. "Have you read the other book?" he asked her. "'Julie de Trecoeur?' Yes." "What did you think of it?" "It was magnificent!" she said shortly, with a quickened breath. "I shall get some more by that man." "Well, you'd better be careful!" He laughed. "I've got some others, but I didn't want to recommend them to you. Lady Fox-Wilton wouldn't exactly approve." "I don't tell mamma what I read." The girl's young voice sounded sharply beside him in the warm autumnal dusk. "But if you lent me anything you oughtn't to lend me I would never speak to you again!" Meryon gave a low whistle. "My goodness! I shall have to mind my p's and q's. I don't know that I ought to have lent you 'Julie de Trecoeur' if it comes to that." "Why not?" Hester turned her great, astonished eyes upon him. "One might as well not read Byron as not read that." "Hm--I don't suppose you read _all_ Byron." He threw her an audacious look. "As much as I want to," she said, indifferently. "Why aren't you in Scotland?" "Because I had to go to London instead. Beastly nuisance! But there was some business I couldn't get out of." "Debts?" she said, raising her eyebrows. The self-possession of this child of eighteen was really amazing. Not a trace in her manner of timidity or tremor. In spite of her flight from him he could not flatter himself that he had made any impression on her nerves. Whereas her beauty and her provocative way were beginning to tell deeply on his own. "Well, I daresay!" His laugh was as frank as her question. "I'm generally in straits." "Why don't you do some work, and earn money?" she asked him, frowning. "Frankly--because I dislike work." "Then why did you write a play?" "Because it amused me. But if it had been acted and made money, and I had had to write another, that would have been work; and I should probably have loathed it." "That I don't believe," she said, shaking her head. "One can always do what succeeds. It's like pouring petrol into the motor." "So you think I'm only idle because I'm a failure?" he asked her, his tone betraying a certain irritation.