"Glory be to God! And is it Denis?" she sobbed.
"Who else would it be?" answered the newcomer.
CHAPTER V.
DENIS QUIRK.
Cairns was compounded of energy, his policy to snatch from the hands of progress all that was good, and make the uttermost use of it. "Try all things," he would say. "Throw away the rubbish, and keep that which is enduring." Under his management, "The Observer" advanced from a second-class country paper to one but little inferior to the metropolitan organs.
One man whom he found on the staff he classified as hopeless.
"Worse than this," he added, speaking to Desmond O'Connor, to whom he unburdened himself, "'Gifford will never learn. He believes himself to be a journalistic planet. I don't mind an ordinary honest fool that knows it is a fool, but a fool that regards its own inane folly as the final thing in wisdom is hopeless. Gifford must go."
Here, however, Cairns found himself opposed to his employer. Ebenezer Brown had so high a respect for Gifford that he had been sorely tempted, after the death of Michael O'Connor, to place the sub-editor in the editorial chair. For this promotion Gifford was fully prepared, and only a very small incident preserved Ebenezer Brown from ruining his paper. It had so chanced that the editor of a leading metropolitan paper had come to the funeral of his former colleague, Michael O'Connor. Meeting Ebenezer Brown after the funeral, he had asked: