"I wonder now if it is not at a price?" said Charteris, rather mirthlessly. "Either way, you have as yet the courage of the unconvicted. And you have managed, out of it all, to get together the makings of an honest book. I do not generally believe in heaping flattery upon young authors, but if I had written that last book of yours it would not grieve me. Even so, I wonder--? But it is dreary here, in this old house, with all my wife's high-minded ancestors chilling the air. Come, let us concoct some curious sort of drink." I looked at him compassionately. "And have Bettie staying up to let me in and smelling it on me! You must be out of your head." And then Charteris laughed and derided me, and afterward we chatted for a good two hours,--quite at random, and disposing of the most important subjects, as was our usage when in argument, in a half-sentence. It was excellent to have Charteris to talk against, and I enjoyed it. Taking him by and large, I loved the little fellow as I have loved no other man. 30. _He Gilds the Weather-Vane_ But I would not go along with Charteris the next morning when he came by the Hamlyns' on his way to King's College. I could not, because I was labouring over a batch of proof-sheets; and as I laboured my admiration for the very clever young man who had concocted this new book augmented comfortably; so that I told Charteris he was a public nuisance, and please to go to Tillietudlem. He had procured the key to the Library,--for the College had not opened as yet,--and meant to borrow an odd volume or so of Lucian. Charteris had evolved the fantastic notion of treating Lucian's Zeus as a tragic figure. He sketched a sympathetic picture of the fallen despot, and of the smokeless altars, girdled by a jeering rabble of so-called philosophers, and of how irritating it must be to anybody to have your actual existence denied. Did I not see the pathos of poor Zeus's situation with the god business practically "cornered," and the Jews getting all the trade? I informed him that the only pathos in life just at present was my inability to disprove, in default of abolishing, the existence of people who bothered me when I was busy. So Charteris went away, just as Byam brought the mail from the post-office. 2 There were two cheques from magazines. Life was very pleasant, in a quiet uneventful world. The _Fairhaven Gazette_ for the week had come, too, to indicate that, as usual, nothing of grave import was happening in an agreeably monotonous world. True, the Bulgarians were issuing an appeal to civilization on the ground that they objected to being massacred, and cyclones were wrecking towns and killing quite a number of persons in Florida, and the strikes in Colorado were leading to divers homicides; but in Fairhaven these things did not seem to matter. And so the front page of the _Gazette_ was, rightfully, reserved for Plans of the College for the Session of 1903-4....