Gareth, straining his ears for all sounds from the inner room, was surprised to hear the word "murder" hurled forth in Campbell's distinctest bellow.... "Yes, I will say it, Alex; I mean it, Miss O'Neill. It's your ain genius ye're strangling, weelfully...."
His voice died down again, probably beneath the admonishment of Alexander's lifted eyebrow.
And then Gareth remembered that the junior partner had, on first reading of the "Reverse of the Medal," remarked to him that a certain passage would have to be cut, and that there would be trouble with Mr. Campbell on the subject. The trouble was evidently in full swing. Perhaps Patricia had yielded too easily to Alexander's suave suggestions; too easily—for Leslie Campbell's liking.
Presently the door opened, and she came out. Gareth did not notice if either of the partners were in attendance upon her exit. Breathlessly he waited; and only when she was level with his desk, did he raise his eyes to meet hers.... She bestowed on him a careless nod, and without pausing, walked straight on to the outer door, and down the stone stairs.
... He sat very still, with the array of uncorrected proofs before him; disappointment like a damp cloud weighing down his soul.
It was as he had dreaded. She had gone past him, actually and in spirit. She was a Personage now. And for weeks and months he would be doomed to move in an atmosphere effervescent with her triumphs; the while she became ever more absorbed by her intellectual intimacies with "Campbell's Young Men"; swang her legs from the table of Campbell's inner sanctum; was impudent as she pleased to Alexander; permitted the awed worship of Jimmy and young Burnett; sometimes graciously remembered to nod to the reader in the outer office!
Worse, far worse, than if she had been the boy he had originally envisioned. Far worse—being Patricia....
For that black hour, it seemed to Gareth that no nightmare could exceed in horror the nightmare of Patricia as One of Them. For that hour he found himself wishing that he had never yielded up her book from its hiding-place in Pacific Villa; never confessed to her his part in its retention....
Then, with a long breath as of one who has been stifled in a clogged slime-fettered stream, he made an attempt to rise above this despondency of sick envy; to regain his old resignation of last summer,—before little Moll Aynsleigh had stirred him with the pages of her "Spring-fret"; before the dream-girl had slipped to him between the pale green beech-stems; before he had been given an attic and a harbour to play with, and sweet prospects of solitude, and a book of his own; before ambition was lit, and flamed, and was quenched again in the heart of the world; and before the coming of Patricia to make him young as romance, and mad as romance, and in love with romance.
All over now. He took up his pencil, and went on quietly correcting proofs. Other people's books had the laugh of him after all. Other people's books would always have the laugh of him.