"Good plots!" he repeated. "I have just scores of them. It is not that part of it I am at a loss about. It is my style I am unhappy and dissatisfied with. There is something--I don't know how to define it-- stilted and priggish, I am afraid, that I am painfully conscious of and yet cannot throw off. I have often thought how it would help me to talk my work over with you, if it would not bore you dreadfully. Even to read some of my MS. _Could_ you make up your mind to such a thing?" I felt flattered, but a little surprised. "_Bore_ me; it certainly would not," I replied. "But I am not the very least in the world a literary person." "No," said Rupert eagerly, quite unconscious of anything uncomplimentary in what he was saying. "I know you are not, and that is just what I like. Your feeling--your intuitive perception is so fresh and natural!" I could scarcely suppress a smile; the dear fellow's way of expressing himself _viva voce_, though he was quite unconscious of it, certainly laid him open to some extent to the charge of "stiltedness"--"priggish" I could not bear to call him, he was so genuine and really modest; the adjective "quaint" seemed to me to suit him better than any other. "I should like very much to read some of your stories or sketches," I said, "or better still, you might read them to me, and then we could discuss them a little as we go on." Then, for the time being, our conversation stopped but by the end of the next act--there were only three in all, as far as I remember--my interest in Rupert's confidences had been increased by that of the drama before us. "By-the-bye," I said, almost before the curtain had fallen, "some parts of this play remind me a little of a story in real life you told me something of. And you half promised to tell me more some day." I spoke and felt eagerly, for a strange idea had struck me--curiously enough as it may seem to any one unaccustomed to meditate on the vagaries of our brains and memories--for the first time. Was there not a certain amount of resemblance not only between the plot gradually unfolding before us, but between Rupert's _real_ story, little though I had heard of it, and the _real_ mystery with which I had come in contact, though of the facts connected with it I knew scarcely more? My companion was flattered by my recollection of his confidences. But yet I saw that he looked a little uncomfortable. "I know what you are referring to," he replied. "But--I haven't anything more to tell you, and I am afraid I can never hope to work up what I know so as to make any practical use of it. They are thinking after all," he went on a little shamefacedly, "now that I am so much stronger, of my going into my father's firm--under Clarence of course-- and the mere fact of my being in it would bar the way to my benefiting as a writer by any of the strange complications lawyers come across in their work."