But the reply came in unfamiliar tones.
Looking up, she observed that her usher had disappeared, and in his place was the detested Vertigo.
To be continued—but not here.
AT THE GATES OF THE WEST.
Scene—The New York landing pier of the Ocean Palace Line, crowded with passengers and their luggage from the R.M.S. "Gargantuan."
Time—About five and a-half hours earlier than ours.
Mr. Horace Rutherford Penfold (the last thing in novelists, surrounded by New York pressmen): "Glad to see you, boys! Delighted to see you! What! Was I hiding from you behind my luggage? What an absolutely absurd idea! The whole way across I've been eagerly looking forward to meeting you gentlemen of the most go-ahead, most enlightened Press on earth! Yes, it's my first visit to your great country. The dream of my life is now realised. Yes, of course I'm rejoiced that my novel, The Love of a Hop-Picker, has taken its place among the 'best sellers' on this side. Yes, people are good enough to say I've broken quite new ground in making the hop-fields the scene of a novel; the critics say my word-pictures of the hop-poles are 'absolutely luscious'; and they pronounce Ozias, the hop-picker, 'a giant of artistic creation.' Yes, my novel is one of the twenty which in the last six months have been called 'epoch-making' and have been said to 'stand quite alone in modern fiction.' No doubt the hop-field will now be exploited by other writers, until in time it will become as hackneyed as the desert.
"Yes, this is my first visit to your wonderful country. I am here to superintend the rehearsals of the dramatised form of The Love of a Hop-Picker. Naturally I am a little nervous, for to please a New York audience is the playwright's dream of heaven. And then, of course, The Love of a Hop-Picker is not only utterly English in atmosphere, but also peculiarly Kentish. Still, with such a brilliantly intelligent, marvellously sympathetic public as yours, I don't despair of bringing the hop-poles over the footlights, so to say.