something. I confess I saw how it wouldn't be in a mere week or
two that I should rid myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose
very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like. I
should probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the
knight's widow (he had been mayor of Clockborough) would pass away
and the heiress would return to her inheritance. I gathered with
surprise that she had not communicated to his wife the story of her
attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this reticence on the
easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the
spring of the sympathy of which she boasted. The girl at any rate
would forget the small adventure, be distracted, take a husband;
besides which she would lack occasion to repeat her experiment.

We clung to the idea of the brilliant course, delivered without an
accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public
aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of
an inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at
least, in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways
and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the
synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage
of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I
laughed at our playbills even while I stickled for them. It was
indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at
moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so
unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound. He
admitted with a candour all his own that he was in truth only to be
depended on in the Mulvilles' drawing-room. "Yes," he suggestively
allowed, "it's there, I think, that I'm at my best; quite late,
when it gets toward eleven--and if I've not been too much worried."
We all knew what too much worry meant; it meant too enslaved for