He found the box; lit the gas at his right hand; coughed:
“Are you putting that down?” he asked drily of the grim unanswering silence.
The boy took no notice. The yellow-haired youth chuckled, and the deep-furrowed lines about his mouth broadened into a quizzical smile.
The boy Oliver could scarcely have been fourteen years of age, and had he not been son of the editor, and that editor the thriftless owner of but a very broken-winged Muse, and of a steadily diminishing literary property, the boy must still have been at school. He sighed heavily, rousing from his reading:
“I say, Netherby,” said he, “here’s a poem by that fellow with the hair.”
He held out the manuscript.
Netherby Gomme looked up:
“A lyric?” he asked.
“No. Drivel.”
Netherby Gomme sighed, and sat back in his chair: