IN PRINT AT LAST
Pauline and Muffie had gone flying down to the gate to run behind the bicycle and tricycle as far as the corner where the little red tricycle had always to turn and come back.
Lynn hung back a moment.
“Take care of this till I come back, will you, Miss Bibby?” she said, “I’m keeping it for Max.”
This was a paper boat that Kate had cleverly folded for Lynn while she waited, using a sheet she tore haphazard from a periodical that she had under her arm, part of the morning’s post.
Miss Bibby took the boat, and when Lynn had darted off after the other young ones, she examined it with a view to finding out how Kate made these clever little things that the children so greatly delighted in.
And there leaped up at her eyes from the printed sheet one of the cutting sentences she had put into the mouth of the hero of her [p228] story, the Hypocrites! Another and another sentence followed—there stood out her own heroine’s name in the heavenly black of type! At last, at last. Oh, how good of him, how very good—he had plainly taken the tale with him, and got it into this Melbourne Review, which was an infinitely better medium than the Evening Mail! How very, very good of him—this explained Kate’s inability to find the MS!
Her eyes tore up and down the folded sail;—this sentence was different—sharper, pithier, better rounded than she had written it. A soliloquy was missing there—and better so, its inclusion would have been a mistake. Oh, how good, how good he was! Her quivering fingers fumbled with the folding—Lynn and Max would forgive her for spoiling their boat when they knew—when she showed them her name in print.
Ah, how hungry were her eyes for the sight of it, the sight of the simple name “Agnes Bibby” at the head of her first signed story—the story that was to take away the reproach from the name that the ill-starred interview had brought!
Then the heavens clapped down on her head and the deadliest sickness assailed her.
The heading of the columns said the Hypocrites, and the line beneath “By Hugh Kinross.”
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