"It is wonderful—simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor: "Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it. Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress in you, Margery, girl?"
"No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it immensely. What made you do it?"
"I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of drawing as it stood, I suppose."
"Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?"
His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract.
"No; you did."
"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never have made Fidelia all over again, as you have in this rewriting."
"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the inspiration to do it."
She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.
"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and—and I'm afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry business with Edward Raymer?"