“Fifteen years, I think,” answered Fenton reflectively. “I spent two years in London and on the Continent just before I went into newspaper work.” “Hum! Very good. Well, the fact is, Mr. Fenton, I have long had a scheme in mind for making a great improvement in our foreign service. Stilson, you know, has resigned the London office. My idea is this: I am very much pleased with young Stoughton’s work as a paragrapher. He’s very pithy, and his style has really created quite a sensation. Now, there is no man in the profession who has a more artistic estimate of news than you have, Mr. Fenton. Furthermore, your acquaintanceship with men and affairs has been wide, and, I might say, international. It seems to me that if you took the London office, with Stoughton as your assistant, we could make a great feature of a line of news-matter in which we have been pretty weak of late years. You catch my idea? You’re to shoot the game, and Stoughton’s to dress it for the table. I needn’t tell you, of course, that your salary will be much larger in London than it is here, and the work will be much easier and of a character more acceptable to your tastes, Mr. Fenton.” John Fenton’s mind had been very busy while Mr. Robinson was speaking. Three months before he would not have hesitated a moment to accept the editor’s proposition. He was not sure now that it did not offer a solution to a difficulty that he had not yet had strength of mind enough to solve himself. But Fenton was not a man to do anything in a hurry--unless it was to fall in love. He looked at Mr. Robinson in silence for a moment, and then said,-- “There is much that is very satisfactory to me in what you have said, Mr. Robinson. But I’m a slow, rather conservative man, and I seldom come to a conclusion in a hurry. May I have a day or two to weigh this matter?” “Oh, certainly, certainly,” answered the editor, not wholly pleased at the position Fenton had taken. “Give me your answer day after to-morrow. It will do as well then as now.” Fenton arose to go. “And about Stoughton?” he asked. Mr. Robinson sat silent for a time. Finally he said,-- “I leave him to you, Mr. Fenton. Talk the matter over with him, and bring him with you when you come to me Monday. Good-day.” Fenton returned to his desk in a more excited mood than he had expected ever to feel again. When a man renews his youth the rejuvenation is apt to bring with it many surprises. That it should make any important difference to him whether he lived in New York or London was an astonishing fact to John Fenton. It was an unpleasant truth that, in a way, forced him to come to a decision that he had been avoiding for a long time. Should he or should he not give up all thought of making Gertrude Van Vleck his wife, was the question that haunted him. And Mr. Robinson, gazing moodily out of the window in his room up-stairs, was thinking that John Fenton’s hesitation was due to ambition. CHAPTER XXI.