He seemed the same old Repellier to Hartley, with the same merry smile and the quiet eyes that had always silently reminded the younger man that he was still young and that youth can never know tranquillity. But about the older man on this occasion, for all his quietness of demeanor, there clung an air of unusual sternness.
"Are you busy?" he asked, as he beheld the paper-littered desk. "I only dropped up to borrow a book of yours that you've often spoken of—The Silver Poppy. I've been overworking, they tell me, and for the rest of the week I'm going to loaf."
He confessed, as Hartley gladly enough produced the volume, that he had never as yet read it—his days had all been so taken up that he got little time for the newer fiction. But only that morning he had picked up an old newspaper notice of the dramatized story and had been unusually interested by it.
"It's rather clever?" Repellier asked, taking the book and skimming through it where he stood. Something in his question seemed almost laughable to the younger man.
"It will open your eyes," was all he said, however.
"I hope it will," said Repellier, slowly closing the volume and slipping it meditatively into his pocket. Then he looked at the still smiling man and asked:
"Are you writing any short stories now?"
"Not now; but I want to."
"Any verse?"
"No—nothing worth while."