visitor found him primed with an offer. A hundred pounds would be
paid him that day, that minute, and no questions would be either
asked or answered. "I take all the risks, I take all the risks," the
editor of the Promiscuous repeated. The letters were out on the
table, Mr. Locket was on the hearthrug, like an orator on a platform,
and Peter, under the influence of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped,
rather weakly, into the seat which happened to be nearest and which,
as he became conscious it moved on a pivot, he whirled round so as to
enable himself to look at his tempter with an eye intended to be
cold. What surprised him most was to find Mr. Locket taking exactly
the line about the expediency of publication which he would have
expected Mr. Locket not to take. "Hush it all up; a barren scandal,
an offence that can't be remedied, is the thing in the world that
least justifies an airing--" some such line as that was the line he
would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in weighing
questions of propriety and who had only the other day objected, in
the light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinterested art.
But the author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put his finger
on the place in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his
last visit that, if given to the world in the pages of the
Promiscuous, Sir Dominick's aberrations would sell the edition. It
was not necessary for Mr. Locket to reiterate to his young friend his
phrase about their making a sensation. If he wished to purchase the
"rights," as theatrical people said, it was not to protect a
celebrated name or to lock them up in a cupboard. That formula of
Baron's covered all the ground, and one edition was a low estimate of
the probable performance of the magazine.

Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the
editorial presence, took a long walk on the Embankment. His