“A lady of whose integrity I am as sure as I am of yours. That’s the odd part of it. Besides, you are both of you too clever to plagiarize, even if you weren’t too honest. The mere similarity of theme isn’t so strange; that happens often enough; but that the title of the stories should be identical, and that in each the heroine should be named May—”
“Is her heroine named May?” I interrupted in astonishment; “why, then, she must have seen my copy; or,” I added, a new thought striking me, “she must have got the name in the same way I did. I took the title of the story and the name of the heroine from a line of Swinburne, and—”
“And,” interrupted the editor in turn, catching up the manuscript before him, “so did she.”
And he showed me, written at the head of the page:—
“If you were April’s lady, and I were lord of May.”
“Well,” I remarked, with a not unnatural mingling of philosophy and annoyance, “it is all of a piece with my theory that ideas are in the air, and belong, like wild geese, to whoever catches them first; but it is vexatious, when I captured a fancy that particularly pleased me, to find that some woman or other has been smart enough to get salt on its tail-feathers before I did.”
Mr. Lane smiled at my desperate air, and at that moment his little office-boy, whom I particularly detest because of the catlike stillness and suddenness of his movements, silently produced first himself and then a card.
“‘Agnes Graham,’” read Mr. Lane. “Here is your rival to speak for herself. I hope you don’t mind seeing her?”
“Oh, by no means,” I replied rather ungraciously. “Let us see what she is like, and what she will have to say about this puzzle.”