Yes, it was all true! The events of that Red Letter Day had really happened. When Arthur awoke the next morning, he had a queer feeling of its all being a dream, a mirage born of ambition. No. The morning paper proved it; a glance at his own table added confirmation.

Revolving Time had brought round the Easter vacation again. The last case heard in the Court of Appeal that sittings was Crewdson v. The Great Southern Railway Company, on appeal from Knaresby, j.'s, judgment on the findings of the jury. (The subsequent history of the great Dog Case lay still in the future.) It was a time of political excitement; Sir Humphrey Fynes, k.c., m.p., had chanced the case being reached, and gone off to rouse the country to a proper sense of its imminent peril if the Government continued so much as a day longer in office. Consequently he was not there to argue Miss Crewdson's case. Mr. Tracy Darton, k.c., was there, but he was also in the fashionable divorce case of the moment, and had to address the jury on the respondent's behalf. He cut his argument before the Court of Appeal suspiciously short, and left to his learned friend Mr. Lisle the task of citing authorities bearing on tricky points relating to the subject of Common Carriers. Arthur was in a tremor when he rose—nearly as much frightened as he had been before Lance and Pretyman, jj., a year ago—but his whole heart was with his dog; he grew excited, he stuck to his guns; they should have those authorities if he died for it! He was very tenacious—and in the end rather long perhaps. But the Court listened attentively, smiling now and then at his youthful ardour, but letting him make his points. When they came to give judgment against his contention, they went out of the way to compliment him. The Master of the Rolls said the Court was indebted to Mr. Lisle for his able argument. Leonard, l.j., confessed that he had been for a moment shaken by Mr. Lisle's ingenious argument. Pratt, l.j., quite agreed with what had fallen from My Lord and his learned Brother concerning Mr. Lisle's conduct of his case. Even Miss Crewdson herself, whose face had been black as thunder at Sir Humphrey's desertion and Mr. Darton's unseemly brevity, and whose shoulders had shrugged scornfully when Arthur rose, found a smile for him in the hour of temporary defeat; that she would lose in the end never entered the indomitable woman's head. Then—out in the corridor, when all was over—Tom Mayne patted him on the back, and almost danced round him for joy and pride—it was impossible to recognise in him the melancholy Mr. Beverley—Norton Ward, hurrying off to another case, called out, "Confound your cheek!" and, to crown all, the august solicitor of the Great Southern Railway Company, his redoubtable opponents, gave him a friendly nod, saying, "I was afraid you were going to turn 'em at the last moment, Mr. Lisle!" That his appreciation was genuine Arthur's table proved. There, newly deposited by triumphant Henry, lay a case to advise the Great Southern Railway Company itself.

"Once you get in with them, sir——!" Henry had said, rubbing his hands together and leaving the rest to the imagination.

Such things come seldom to any man, but once or twice in their careers to many. They came to Arthur as the crown of a term's hard work, mostly over Norton Ward's briefs—for Norton Ward had come to rely on him now and kept him busy 'devilling'—but with some little things of his own too; for Wills and Mayne were faithful, and another firm had sent a case also. His neck was well in the collar; his fee book had become more than a merely ornamental appurtenance. Long and hard, dry and dusty, was the road ahead. Never mind! His feet were on it, and if he walked warily he need fear no fatal slip. Letting the case to advise wait—his opinion would not be needed before the latter part of the vacation, Henry said—he sat in his chair, smoking and indulging in pardonably rosy reflections.

"Rather different from what it was this time last year!" said Honest Pride with a chuckle.

A good many things had been rather different with him a year ago, he might have been cynically reminded; for instance the last Easter vacation he had dedicated to Miss Marie Sarradet, and he was not dedicating this coming one to Mrs. Sidney Barslow; and other things, unknown a year ago, had figured on the moving picture of his life, and said their say to him, and gone their way. But to-day he was looking forward and not back, seeing beginnings, not endings, not burying the past with tears or smiles, but hailing the future with a cheery cry of welcome for its hazards and its joys.

Henry put his head in at the door. "Sir Christopher Lance has rung up, sir, and wants to know if you'll lunch with him to-day at one-thirty—at his house."

"Yes, certainly. Say, with pleasure." Left alone again, Arthur ejaculated "Splendid!" Sir Christopher had seen the report in the paper! He read the law reports, of course. A thought crossed Arthur's mind—would they read the law reports at Hilsey? They might not have kept their eye on his case. He folded up the paper and put it carefully in the little bag which he was now in the habit of carrying to and fro between his lodgings and his chambers.

Sir Christopher was jubilant over the report. "A feather in your cap to get that out of Leonard—a crusty old dog, but a deuced fine lawyer!" he said. But the news of the case from the Great Southern Railway Company meant yet more to him. "If they take you up, they can see you through, Arthur."

"If I don't make a fool of myself," Arthur put in.

"Oh, they'll expect you to do that once or twice. Don't be frightened. The dog of yours is a lucky dog, eh? All you've got to do now is to take things quietly, and not fret. Remember that only one side can win, and it's not to be expected that you'll be on the right side always. I think you'll be done over the dog even, in the end, you know."

"Not I!" cried Arthur indignantly. "That Harrogate cur's not our dog, sir."

"Human justice is fallible," laughed the old man. "Anyhow it's a good sporting case. And what are you going to do with yourself now?"

"I'm off to Hilsey for a fortnight's holiday. Going at four o'clock."

"Losing no time," Sir Christopher remarked with a smile.

"Well, it's jolly in the country in the spring, isn't it?" Arthur asked, rather defensively.

"Yes, it's jolly in the spring—jolly anywhere in the spring, Arthur."

Arthur caught the kindly banter in his tone; he flushed a little and smiled in answer. "It was very jolly there in the winter too, if you come to that, sir. Ripping skating!"

"Does all the family skate?"

"No, not all the family." He laughed. "Just enough of it, Sir Christopher."

The old man sat back in his chair and sipped his hock. "Some men can get on without a woman about them but, so far as I've observed you, I don't think you're that sort. If you must have a woman about you, there's a good deal to be said for its being your own wife, and not, as so often happens, somebody else's. May we include that among our recent discoveries?"

"But your own wife costs such a lot of money."

"So do the others—very often. Don't wait too long for money, or for too much of it. Things are jolliest in the spring!"

"I suppose I'm rather young. I'm only twenty-five, you know."

"And a damned good age for making love too!" Sir Christopher pronounced emphatically.

"Oh, of course, if that's your experience, sir!" laughed Arthur.

Sir Christopher grew graver. "Does the wound heal at Hilsey?"

"Yes, I think so—slowly."

"Surgery's the only thing sometimes; when you can't cure, you must cut. At any rate we won't think hardly of our beautiful friend. I don't believe, though, that you're thinking of her at all, you young rascal! You're thinking of nothing but that train at four o'clock."

Arthur was silent a moment or two. "I daresay that some day, when it's a bit farther off, I shall be able to look at it all better—to see just what happened and what it came to. But I can't do that now. I—I haven't time." They had finished lunch. He came and rested his hand on the old man's shoulder. "At any rate, it's brought me your friendship. I can't begin to tell you what that is to me, sir."

Sir Christopher looked up at him. "I can tell you what it is to me, though. It's a son for my barren old age—and I'm quite ready to take a daughter too, Arthur."

Arthur went off by the four o'clock train, with his copy of The Times in his pocket. But out of that pocket it never emerged, save in the privacy of his den, and there it was hidden carefully. Never in all his life did he confess that he had "happened" to bring it down with him. For, on the platform at Hilsey, the first thing he saw was Judith waiting for him. As soon as he put his head out of the window, she ran towards him, brandishing The Times in her hand. No motive to produce his copy, no need to confess that he had brought it!

His attitude towards Judith's copy was one of apparent indifference. It could not be maintained in face of her excitement and curiosity. The report seemed to have had on her much the same effect as skating. She proposed to walk home, and let the car take his luggage, and, as soon as they were clear of the station, she cried, "Now you've got to tell me all—all—about it! What are the Rolls, and who's the Master of them? What's Lord Justice Leonard like? And the other one—what's his name?—Pratt? And what was it in your speech that they thought so clever?"

"I thought perhaps you wouldn't see it," said Arthur, not mentioning that he had taken his own measures to meet that contingency, had it arisen.

"Not see it! Why, I hunt all through those wretched cases every morning of my life, looking for that blessed dog of yours! So I shall, till it's found, or buried, or something. Now begin at the beginning, and tell me just how everything happened."

"I say, this isn't the shortest way home, you know."

"I know it isn't. Begin now directly, Arthur." She had hold of his arm now, The Times still in her other hand. "Godfrey's quite excited too—for him. He'd have come, only he's got a bad cold; and Margaret stayed to comfort him. Begin now!"

His attitude of indifference had no chance. All the story was dragged from him by reiterated "And thens—?" He warmed to it himself, working up through their lordships, through Miss Crewdson's smile ("She looks an uncommonly nice old girl," he interjected), through Tom Mayne's raptures and Norton Ward's jocose tribute, to the climax of the august solicitor and the case to advise which attested his approval. "That may mean a lot to me," Arthur ended.

"The people you'd been trying to beat!" Her voice sounded awed at the wonder of it. "I should have thought they'd just hate you. I wish I was a man, Arthur! Aren't you awfully proud of it all?"

Well, he was awfully proud, there was no denying it. "I wish the dear old mater could have read it!"

She pressed his arm. "We can read it. I've helped Margaret to spell it out. She's feeling rather afraid of you, now that you've got your name in the paper. And Godfrey's been looking up all the famous Lisles in the County History! You won't have to be doing Frank Norton Ward's work for him now all the time—and for nothing too!"

In vain he tried to tell her how valuable the devilling was to him. No, she thought it dull, and was inclined to lay stress on the way Norton Ward found his account in it. Arthur gave up the effort, but, somewhat alarmed by the expectations he seemed to be raising, ventured to add, "Don't think I'm going to jump into five thousand a year, Judith!"

"Let me have my little crow out, and then I'll be sensible about it," she pleaded.

But he did not in his heart want her sensible; her eyes would not be so bright, nor her cheeks glow with colour; her voice would not vibrate with eager joyfulness, nor her laugh ring so merrily; infectious as Miss Ayesha Layard's own, it was really! Small wonder that he caught the infection of her sanguine pleasure too. Long roads seemed short that evening, whether they led to fame and fortune, or only through the meadows and across the river to Hilsey Manor.

"Now the others will want to hear all about it," said Judith, with something like a touch of jealousy.

The story had to be told again—this time with humorous magniloquence for Margaret's benefit, with much stress on their lordships' wigs and gowns, a colourable imitation of their tones and manner, and a hint of the awful things they might have done to Arthur if he had displeased them—which Margaret, with notions of a trial based on Alice in Wonderland, was quite prepared to believe. Godfrey shuffled about within earshot, his carpet slippers (his cold gave good excuse for them) padding up and down the room as he listened without seeming to listen, and his shy, "Very—very—er—satisfactory to you, Arthur!" coming with a pathetic inadequacy at the end of the recital.

Then—before dinner—a quiet half-hour in his own den upstairs, where everything was ready for him and seemed to expect him, where fresh fragrant flowers on table and chimney-piece revealed affectionate anticipation of his coming, where the breeze blew in, laden with the sweetness of spring, through the open windows. As he sat by them, he could hear the distant cawing of the rooks and see the cattle grazing in the meadows. The river glinted under the setting sun, the wood on the hill stood solid and sombre with clear-cut outline. The Peace of God seemed to rest on the old place and to wrap it round in a golden tranquillity. His heart was in a mood sensitive to the suggestion. He rested after his labours, after the joyful excitement of the last twenty-four hours. So Hilsey too seemed to rest after its struggle, and to raise in kind security the head that had bent before the storm.

He had left his door ajar and had not heard anyone enter. But presently—it may be that he had fallen into a doze, or a state of passive contemplation very like one—he found Judith standing by the arm-chair in which he was reclining—oh, so lazily and pleasantly! She looked as if she might have been there for some little while, some few moments at all events, and she was gazing out on the fairness of the evening with a smile on her lips.

"I've been putting Margaret to bed—she was allowed an extra hour in your honour—and then I just looked in here to see if you wanted anything."

"I shall make a point of wanting as many things as I possibly can. I love being waited on, and I've never been able to get enough of it. I shall keep you busy! Judith, to think that I was once going to desert Hilsey! Well, I suppose we shall be turned out some day." He sighed lightly and humorously over the distant prospect of ejection by Margaret, grown-up, married perhaps, and the chÂtelaine.

"If you want to know your future, I happen to be able to tell you," said Judith. "Margaret arranged it while she was getting into bed."

"Oh, let's hear this! It's important—most important!" he cried, sitting up.

"If you don't want to go on living here, you're to have a house built for you up on the hill there. On the other side of the wood, I insisted; otherwise you'd spoil the view horribly! But Margaret didn't seem to mind about that."

"Yes, I think I must be behind the wood—especially if I'm to have a modern artistic cottage."

"There you're to live—when you're not in London, being praised by judges—and you're to come down the hill to tea every day of the week."

"It doesn't seem a bad idea—only she might sometimes make it dinner!"

"She'll make it dinner when she's bigger, I daresay. At present, for her, you see, dinner doesn't count."

"Why does she think I mightn't want to go on living here? Is she contemplating developments in my life? Or in her own? And where are you going to live while I'm living on the top of the hill, out of sight behind the wood? Did Margaret settle your future too, Judith?"

"I don't think it occurs to her that I've got one—except just to go on being here. We women—we ordinary women—get our futures settled for us. I think Bernadette settled mine the day she ran away and left poor Hilsey derelict."

He looked up at her with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. "Should you put the settling of your fate quite as early as that, Judith?"

She saw what he meant and shook her head at him in reproof, but her eyes were merry and happy.

"Have you thought over that idea of Switzerland in the winter?"

"It's the spring now. Why do you want to think of winter?"

"The thought of winter makes the spring even pleasanter." She smiled as she rested her hand on his shoulder and looked down on his face. "Well, perhaps—if I can possibly persuade Godfrey to come with us."

"If he won't? What are we to do if we can get nobody to go with us?"

She broke into a low gentle laugh. "Well, I don't want to get rusty in my skating. And it's splendid over there." Her eyes met his for a moment in gleeful confession. "Still—the best day's skating I ever had in my life, Arthur, was the first day we skated here at Hilsey."

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VICTORY. By Joseph Conrad, Author of 'Chance.'

In this story Mr. Conrad returns to the manner of his famous early romance, The Outcast of the Island. The principal character, a lawless adventurer called 'Enchanted Heyst,' is one of the great figures in Mr. Conrad's gallery; the scene is laid in and about the tropical island of Samburan; and the theme is love and jealousy.

BEALBY. By H. G. Wells.

This new novel is a feast of fast and furious fun. Mr. Wells throws problems of all sorts to the dogs, and revels in the diverting adventures of a small boy who, in the course of one brief week, works havoc in the lives of many people. Delightful people are they all, as portrayed by Mr. Wells, from the self-important, philosophic Lord Chancellor down to the socialistic (and very dirty) tramp.

A GREAT MAN. By Arnold Bennett, Author of 'Clayhanger.'

This is a new edition of a well-known novel by Mr. Arnold Bennett, called by him a 'frolic.' It may be said to have paved the way for his famous comic romance The Card and its sequel The Regent. In A Great Man Mr. Bennett describes the life and achievements of Henry Shakespeare Knight, who from humble beginnings becomes a world-famous novelist and one of the wealthiest of playwrights, a goal attained only after much amusing adventure by the way.

A YOUNG MAN'S YEAR. By Anthony Hope.

The story of an eventful year in the life of Arthur Lisle, of the Middle Temple, Esquire: recounting his fortunes and ventures, professional, speculative, and romantic, and showing how he sought without finding, and found without seeking, and, at the end of the year, was twelve months older and as much wiser as young men are for such experiences.

SECRET HISTORY. By C. N. and A. M. Williamson, Authors of 'The Lightning Conductor.'

The title of this book refers to the 'secret history' of a recent critical episode between the United States and Mexico. Taking the form of the dramatic and sensational love stories of two Irish girls and two officers, the romance has its scenes partly at an army post in Texas and partly in diplomatic circles in London in 1914-15. The story is told in the first person by Lady Peggy O'Malley.

GOSSAMER. By George A. Birmingham, Author of 'Spanish Gold.'

In this book the principal characters are a leader in the world of international finance, an Irish country gentleman who has parted with his estate, an Irish journalist who is also a member of Parliament attached to the Nationalist party, a lady artist, and an inventor occupied with mechanical devices. The story ends with the declaration of war in August 1914, and culminates in the effect of that catastrophe on the lives and fortunes of the various characters.

BECAUSE OF THESE THINGS. By Marjorie Bowen.

This story relates the inevitable tragic drama of the reckless union of two diverse temperaments and races, brought together by a useless passion. The scene changes from Bologna, the most dissipated city of Italy, to the Calvinistic gloom of Scotland.

THE RAINBOW. By D. H. Lawrence, Author of 'Sons and Lovers.'

This story, by one of the most remarkable of the younger school of novelists, contains a history of the Brangwen character through its developing crisis of love, religion, and social passion, from the time when Tom Brangwen, the well-to-do Derbyshire farmer, marries a Polish lady, to the moment when Ursula, his granddaughter, the leading-shoot of the restless, fearless family, stands waiting at the advance-post of our time to blaze a path into the future.

DAVID PENSTEPHEN. By Richard Pryce, Author of 'Christopher.'

The author deals with the early years of a boy's life. The action of the story, opening abroad, and then moving to London and to English country houses, takes place in the seventies. The story is almost as much the story of David's mother as of David himself, and shows, against a background of the manners of the time, the consequences of a breaking away from the established order. How, under the shadow, David's childhood is yet almost wholly happy, and how on the threshold of manhood he is left ready—his heart's desire in view—to face life in earnest and to make a new name for himself in his own way, these pages tell.

THE KENNEDY PEOPLE. By W. Pett Ridge, Author of 'The Happy Recruit.'

The author is, in this novel, still faithful to London, but he sets out here to till something like fresh ground. A description is given of three generations of a family, and particulars are conveyed of the kind of chart that represented their advances and their retreats. The story is told in Mr. Pett Ridge's lively and characteristic manner.

Mr. GREX OF MONTE CARLO. By E. Phillips Oppenheim, Author of 'Master of Men.'

Mr. Oppenheim has never written a more absorbing story than this one, in which an adventurous young American first falls in love, then into trouble, and becomes a part of events that are making history.

In Monte Carlo three men skilled in international intrigue meet in secret conference; two Ministers of foreign affairs and a Grand Duke plan to make over the map of Europe, while a diplomat representing a fourth great world-power, aided by skilled secret-service men, aims to thwart their endeavours. Then—enter the American. How young Richard Lane, wealthy and used to having his own way, fell in love with mysterious Mr. Grex's daughter, how he was not discouraged even when he found out what an important personage Mr. Grex really was, how he took a hand in events and caused an upset, is told in a thrilling love story that lays bare the methods of modern international diplomatists and incidentally conveys a warning to America to arm herself against the possibilities of war.

THE EVIL DAY. By Lady Troubridge.

In this book Lady Troubridge abandons for the first time the study of the very young girl, to give us one of a woman of forty, who, until the story opens, has led a quiet, retired and domestic existence. Circumstances, however, bring the heroine face to face with modern life and its developments in their most vivid form, and she does not pass through the experience altogether unscathed.

THE SECRET SON. By Mrs. Henry Dudeney.

Mrs. Henry Dudeney's new novel is a delightful story of the Sussex Downs. Its types and characters are rustic, and in it comedy and tragedy are skilfully mingled by this most accomplished writer. The theme of the book is the relation between mother and son, and the reader passes to the close of a very human story with a most absorbing interest.

DEMI-ROYAL. By Ashton Hilliers, Author of 'The Adventures of a Lady of Quality.'

That the famous Mrs. Fitzherbert, legal and loyal wife of the Regent, may have borne him a child is indisputable. That she did so is the author's thesis in this diverting romance; and the fortunes of this child, legitimate, but un-royal, trepanned, lost, mourned as dead, repudiated, traced, acknowledged, are his theme. The mother-love of a noble woman, the fears of a selfish voluptuary, the self-sacrifice of honest York, form the warp across which runs the woof of a girl's life lived innocently and spiritedly in Puritan surroundings, watched over by the Order of Jesus, the unconscious centre of vehement antagonisms.

SOMETHING NEW. By P. G. Wodehouse, Author of 'The Little Nugget.'

The treatment of this story is farcical, but all the characters are drawn carefully as if it were a comedy. Ashe Marson, a struggling writer of adventure stories, sees an advertisement in a paper in which 'a young man of good appearance who is poor and reckless, is needed for a delicate and perilous enterprise.' Joan Valentine, the heroine, who has been many things in her time, also answers an advertisement requiring 'a woman to conduct a delicate and perilous enterprise.'

THE HIGHWAYMAN. By H. C. Bailey, Author of 'A Gentleman Adventurer.'

This is a story set in the last years of Queen Anne. Naturally, Jacobite and Hanoverian plots and conspirators furnish much of the incident. They are, however, only a background to the hero and heroine, whose love with its adventures and misadventures is the main subject of the novel. Though Marlborough and the Old Pretender, Queen Anne and other figures of history play their part, it is the hero and heroine who hold the centre of the stage.

THE YELLOW CLAW. By Sax Rohmer, Author of 'Dr. Fu-Manchu.'

This is an enthralling tale of Eastern mystery and crime in a European setting. The action moves from an author's flat in Westminster to the 'Cave of the Golden Dragon,' Shadwell, and the weird Catacombs below the level of the Thames, and circles round 'Mr. King,' the sinister and unseen president of the Kan-Suh Opium Syndicate. We meet with the beautiful Eurasian, MahÂra, 'Our Lady of the Poppies,' and are introduced to M. Gaston Max, Europe's greatest criminologist, and to the beetle-like Chinaman, Ho-Pin.

THE OCEAN SLEUTH. By Maurice Drake.

This is an exciting story, by one of the most promising of the younger novelists, of perils by sea and criminal hunting by land. The tale begins with some exciting salvage while off the Cornish coast, and passes on to the allurements of detective work in England and Brittany. In Austin Voogdt, the hero, Mr. Drake has created a commanding figure in romance.

THE PERPETUAL CHOICE. By Constance Cotterell, Author of 'The Virgin and the Scales.'

The Perpetual Choice runs between poverty and wealth, passion and prejudice, London and the country, and is the story of a high-spirited girl. She has to discover the precariousness of housekeeping on enthusiasm with her strange friends, and finds that poverty is partly fun and partly a blight. Three men love her, all differently, and when she falls in love her crisis has come.

CHARLES QUANTRILL. By Evelyn Apted.

A story of quiet charm and of intense human interest. The interest of the book does not depend on sensational effects, but rather in the endeavour to apply insight and imagination to the faithful description of events and problems which might confront any one of its readers. The scene shifts at times from England to South Africa, Norway, and the Riviera. A perfectly natural sequence of events leads to the marriage of a girl of strong character with a man of principles less high than her own. The writer brings the story to a dramatic close about two years after the marriage.

LITTLE HEARTS. By Marjorie L. Pickthall.

A story of the Forest and the Downs in the troubled times of the eighteenth century, telling how Mr. Sampson, a gentleman engaged in the production of a Philosophy of Poverty, rescues and shelters one Anthony Oakshott, who is thrown from horseback over his wall, and whom he takes for an heroic Jacobite, much wanted by the King's men. By so doing he changes his own life and that of the girl he loves.

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