“As soon as the book comes back from the next publisher.”
Then he sat down to breakfast; and afterwards, without resting, he finished the pot-boiler, and took it to the editor. After a due interval he went again, trembling and faint with anxiety. He had sold only one book-review, and he was using Corydon’s money again. People who hated him had predicted that he would do just that, and he had answered that he would die first!
He came home, radiant with delight. “He says he’ll take it!” he proclaimed. “Only I’ve got to do a new ending for the fourth installment—he wants something more exciting. So I’m going to have the countess caught in a burning tower!”
And he wrote that, and went yet again, and came home with a hundred dollars buttoned tightly in his inside vest-pocket. He was like a man who has escaped from a dungeon. The field was clear before him at last! His manifesto was going out to the world!
BOOK V. THE BAIT IS SEIZED
They sat, gazing down the slope of the little vale. She was turning idly the pages of the book, and she read to him—
“Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night!—
Only, methinks, some loss of habit’s power
Befalls me wandering through this upland dim.
Once pass’d I blindfold here, at any hour;
Now seldom come I, since I came with him.”
“It was here we first read the poem,” he said. “Every spot brings back some line of it.”