He followed his first impulse and went to Cordelia herself, at once. She had just come in from the florist's, and she greeted him over an armful of white roses, which she still held unconsciously before her as she let her eyes linger for a studious minute on his face. He felt vaguely sorry for her--there was an inalienable touch of pathos in the thought of the stricken hand of the master. It seemed to leave her so hopeless and alone--for all along he had more than half felt that she was not altogether at rest in the life into which success had forced her. She led him timidly up to the little yellow study, and waited for him to speak. She had noticed the manuscript in his hand. He found it very hard to begin. "You don't like it, I know," she said, tearing a flower to pieces. She looked up at him almost appealingly, and then went on. "I don't like it myself. I think I've lost my grip on it. It keeps running away from me, and throwing me out, and dragging me after it." As he looked at her in her helplessness, he tried to tell himself that he had been unduly harsh in his first judgment. Then he turned to her and attempted to explain how with a possible touch or two it might be remodeled, how splendid it would be, once it was whipped into shape. She only shook her head dolefully. "I'm tired of it," she said. Hartley seemed unable to explain to himself why a mere mood of temporary inadequacy should crush her into hopelessness. "Then let me do it," he suggested. "Dear friend," she said gratefully but sorrowfully, "what time have you for such things?" "I couldn't give my days to it, of course," he confessed. "But I have my nights. With a couple of hours in the morning, why, a few weeks ought to see it finished." She shook her head with childlike dolefulness. "Then what will you do with it?" he asked her. The question seemed to frighten her. She scarcely knew, she said. They had been clamoring for it so long. She thought she would put it aside and take it up again with a fresh hand. "Then let me take it in the meantime," Hartley pleaded. She made a proposal to him--it seemed to come to her in the form of a sudden inspiration. "Let's collaborate on it," she cried. "I would much rather simply help you a bit if I could." "But don't you see, we can divvy--as we say over here--on the royalties. I've refused twenty per cent and a thousand dollars down. That means two or three thousand dollars, anyway." Hartley would not hear of it. Cordelia hovered over him and pleaded with him and coaxed him, but he was obdurate to the end. He dreaded to think of that dainty little yellow study ever being converted, to him, into a bookseller's counting-house. A sudden hot sense of dissatisfaction with himself, and with things as they were, crept over him; he felt that he ought to be going, wondering why, during all that visit, Cordelia appeared so far away from him, so unreal and phantasmal.