“You mean to tell me that _you_ wrote this book?” he said. He was quite roused. “No; not all of it. Look; that bit is mine, and that; and the beginning of this chapter. Nearly the whole of the third chapter is by me.” He closed the book without interest, and indeed he felt astonished at his father’s excitement. The incident seemed to him unimportant. “And you say that eighty or ninety pages of this book are yours, and these scoundrels have stolen your work?” “Well, I suppose they have. I’ll fetch the manuscript, if you would like to look at it.” The manuscript was duly produced, wrapped in brown paper, with Messrs. Beit’s address label on it, and the post-office dated stamps. “And the other book has been out a month.” The parson, forgetting the sacerdotal office, and his good habit of grinning, swore at Messrs. Beit and Mr. Ritson, calling them damned thieves, and then began to read the manuscript, and to compare it with the printed book. “Why, it’s splendid work. My poor fellow,” he said after a while, “I had no notion you could write so well. I used to think of such things in the old days at Oxford; ‘old Bill,’ the tutor, used to praise my essays, but I never wrote anything like this. And this infernal ruffian of a Ritson has taken all your best things and mixed them up with his own rot to make it go down. Of course you’ll expose the gang?” Lucian was mildly amused; he couldn’t enter into his father’s feelings at all. He sat smoking in one of the old easy chairs, taking the rare relish of a hot grog with his pipe, and gazing out of his dreamy eyes at the violent old parson. He was pleased that his father liked his book, because he knew him to be a deep and sober scholar and a cool judge of good letters; but he laughed to himself when he saw the magic of print. The parson had expressed no wish to read the manuscript when it came back in disgrace; he had merely grinned, said something about boomerangs, and quoted Horace with relish. Whereas now, before the book in its neat case, lettered with another man’s name, his approbation of the writing and his disapproval of the “scoundrels,” as he called them, were loudly expressed, and, though a good smoker, he blew and puffed vehemently at his pipe. “You’ll expose the rascals, of course, won’t you?” he said again. “Oh no, I think not. It really doesn’t matter much, does it? After all, there are some very weak things in the book; doesn’t it strike you as ‘young?’ I have been thinking of another plan, but I haven’t done much with it lately. But I believe I’ve got hold of a really good idea this time, and if I can manage to see the heart of it I hope to turn out a manuscript worth stealing. But it’s so hard to get at the core of an idea—the heart, as I call it,” he went on after a pause. “It’s like having a box you can’t open, though you know there’s something wonderful inside. But I do believe I’ve a fine thing in my hands, and I mean to try my best to work it.”