"'Kate,' I repeated, 'do you know what I was thinking of when I held the line while you were half way down the cliff?'
"'No,' she murmured, while a flush suffused her cheek.
"'I was thinking, Kate,' I said, 'that if the rope broke I should be very sorry.'
"'Edward!' she exclaimed.
"I clasped her in my arms.
"'Shall I make a confession,' said Kate, looking up timidly, half an hour later, as I tenderly unclasped the noble girl from my encircling arms, ...'I was thinking the same thing too.'"
So Kate and Edward had their day and then, as Tennyson says, they "passed," or as less cultivated people put it, "they were passed up in the air."
As the years went by they failed to please. Kate was a great improvement upon Madeline. But she wouldn't do. The truth was, if one may state it openly, Kate wasn't TOUGH enough. In fact she wasn't tough at all. She turned out to be in reality just as proper and just as virtuous as Madeline.
So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero. For all of his tempered muscles and his lariat and his Winchester rifle, he was presently exposed as a fraud. He was just as Long-winded and just as Immaculate as the Victorian Hero that he displaced.
What the public really wants and has always wanted in its books is wickedness. Fiction was recognised in its infancy as being a work of the devil.