Frenside seemed to be groping in a heap of dusty recollections. "Yes—sure enough. It comes back to me. He turned up at the office one day, and unloaded a lot of fool poetry." (Halo remembered too, and winced.) "Then, when I told him the stuff wouldn't do, he pulled this out. Let me see: yes, that's it. I thought it better than most things of the kind; and anyhow the boy looked so starved and scared that I took it. Never saw him but that once, as well as I can remember."

Halo was no longer listening: she had plunged again into her reading. Yes; Frenside was right—the poetry, though it had possibilities (or seemed to, by that mountain pool at sunrise) was a poor parrotlike effort compared to this blunt prose, almost telegraphic in its harsh directness. She read on, absorbed.

"Well—?" Lewis queried, triumphant.

She came back to him from a long way. "What a strange thing it is—how terrible!"

"Fine, though? That fellow ought to be watched. Don't you think so, Frenny?"

Frenside rose, throwing his cigar end into the embers. "Well, it's a toss-up. This is the early morning 'slice-of-life'; out of the boy's own experience, most likely. Wait and see what happens when he tackles something outside of himself. That's where the test comes in."

Halo asked: "Didn't he send anything else?" and Frenside, rummaging among more faded memories, thought that, yes, he had—articles and stories, all raw stuff, unusable. That was the general rule; any chap with a knack could usually pull off one good thing at the start… .

"This shows more than knack."

Frenside shrugged, said he hoped so, wished them goodbye, and shuffled out into the hall, getting grumblingly into his overcoat with the help of Tarrant, who came back rubbing his hands and smiling. "Well, my dear, there's your great critic: couldn't even remember when and how he'd got hold of a thing like this, or whether the boy had sent him anything else as good! No knowing what we've lost—or how to get hold of him now. Not a trace of his address on the books. The way that paper was run—!" He sank down by the fire with a dry wrinkling of lips and nostrils. "I rather flatter myself things will go differently now … "

"Oh, Lewis! But of course—with your flair."

He stroked his slight moustache lingeringly, using his hand, as she knew, to mask a satisfaction that might have appeared too crude. "Well, I suppose one has the instinct or one hasn't… ." he murmured.

"I'm so glad, dear, that you have it. You saw at once what this was worth, didn't you? But we must get at the boy—a young man now, I suppose," she mused. "How long ago it all seems! I wonder how we can run him down? Why, through the Tracys, of course! I'll write to Mrs. Tracy now."