"Well, but I was just going to say, and that's all right, of course, though you do sort of think of Falstaff as having one. But the other two came back, although I can't see why, when you look at the stuff those very magazines—!"
"You will see, by and by," I assured him: "and then you will wonder about the stories that did not come back."
"Anyhow, I got a hundred and five dollars for the lot of them. Yes, sir, not a cent less. And to have three out of five stick, the very first time, is pretty unusual, don't you think?"
To that I assented. "It is the bait in the trap, it is the stroke of doom, it is the tasted pomegranate of Persephone."
"Then I have the notion for a book, too. It's about a young man who is in love with a girl—"
"That now is a good idea. It is an idea that has possibilities."
"—Only, he can't ask her to marry him, because she has lots of money, and he is poor. Of course, though, it all comes out all right in the end. His uncle left another will, you see."
"Now was that will, by any chance," I wondered, "discovered long years afterward, in the secret drawer of an old desk? and did it transform your high-minded but impoverished hero into a multi-millionaire?"
And the young man asked, "Why, how did you know?"
"It is not always possible to explain these divinations. Such flashes of imaginative clairvoyance just incommunicably come to me sometimes."