“But what do you do, my dear fellow?” he asked. “What becomes of you?”
“I go away to think out what is coming. The environment I seek helps me,” answered Andrew, with a curious, gleaming smile. “I return full of fresh copy.”
This was true enough. He generally mysteriously departed when the book was beginning to flag, and on his reappearance he always set to work with new vigour and confidence.
“It seems to me,” Henley said, “that it will be your book after all, not mine. It is your plot, and when I think things over I find that every detail is yours. You insisted on the house where the man and the woman hid themselves being on the Chelsea Embankment. You invented the woman, her character, her appearance. You named her Olive Beauchamp.”
“Olive Beauchamp,” Andrew repeated, with a strange lingering over the two words, which he pronounced in a very curious voice that trembled, as if with some keen emotion, love or hate. “Yes; I named her as you say.”
“Then, as the man in the play remarks, ‘Where do I come in?’” Henley asked, half laughing, half vexed. “Upon my word, I shall have some compunction in putting my name below yours on the title-page when the book is published, if it ever is.”
Andrew’s lips twitched once or twice uneasily. Then he said, “You need not have any such compunction. The greatest chapter will probably be written by you.”
“Which chapter do you mean?”
“That which winds the story up—that which brings the whole thing to its legitimate conclusion. You must write the dénouement.”
“I doubt if I could. And then we have not even now decided what it is to be.”