“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.”
“We need not bother about that yet. It will come. Fate will decide it for us.”
“What do you mean, Andrew? How curiously you talk about the book sometimes—so precisely as if it were true!”
Trenchard smiled again, struck a match, and lit his pipe.
“It seems true to me—when I am writing it,” he answered. “I have been writing it these last two days and nights when I have been away, and now I can go forward, if you agree to the new development which I suggest.”