She turned horribly pale, stammering something about his coming with her, resisting a little as he drew her out, down the stairs, and aided her to enter the depot-wagon. There he kissed her; and she caught him around the neck, holding him convulsively. "Nonsense," he whispered. "I've talked it all over with father; he and I'll talk it over some day with you. Then you'll understand." And backing away he called to the coachman: "Drive on!" ignoring his brother-in-law, who sat huddled in a corner, glassy eyes focused on him. * * * * * Portlaw almost capered with surprise and relief when at breakfast he learned that the Tressilvains had departed. "Oh, everything is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily--"like the last chapter of a bally novel--the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two. It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his villains! It's never done in decent literature--never done anywhere except in real life." He swallowed his coffee and, lighting a cigarette, tipped back his chair, balancing himself with one hand on the table. "The use of the gun," he said lazily, "is obsolete in the modern novel; the theme now is, how to be passionate though pure. Personally, being neither one nor the other, I remain uninterested in the modern novel." "Real life," said Portlaw, spearing a fish-ball, "is damn monotonous. The only gun-play is in the morning papers." "Sure," nodded Malcourt, "and there's too many shooting items in 'em every day to make gun-play available for a novel.... Once, when I thought I could write--just after I left college--they took me aboard a morning newspaper on the strength of a chance I had to discover a missing woman. "She was in hiding; her name had been horribly spattered in a divorce, and the poor thing was in hiding--had changed her name, crept off to a little town in Delaware. "Our enlightened press was hunting for her; to find her was termed a 'scoop,' I believe.... Well--boys pull legs off grasshoppers and do other damnable things without thinking.... I found _her_.... So as I knocked at her door--in the mean little farmhouse down there in Delaware--she opened it, smiling--she was quite pretty--and blew her brains out in my very face." "Wh-what!" bawled Portlaw, dropping knife and fork. "I--I want to see that girl again--some time," said Malcourt thoughtfully. "I would like to tell her that I didn't mean it--case of boy and grasshopper, you know.... Well, as you say, gun-play has no place in real novels. There wouldn't be room, anyway, with all the literature and illustrations and purpose and purple preciousness; as anachronismatically superfluous as sleigh-bells in hell." Portlaw resumed his egg; Malcourt considered him ironically. "Sporty Porty, are you going to wed the Pretty Lady of Pride's Hall at Pride's Fall some blooming day in June?" "None of your infernal business!"