Page:Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams.djvu/86

THE HILL OF DREAMS 'No; not all of it. Look; that bit is mine, and that; and the beginning of this chapter. Nearly the whole of the third chapter is by me.'

He closed the book without interest, and indeed he felt astonished at his father's excitement. The incident seemed to him unimportant.

'And you say that eighty or ninety pages of this book are yours, and these scoundrels have stolen your work?'

'Well, I suppose they have. I'll fetch the manuscript, if you would like to look at it.'

The manuscript was duly produced, wrapped in brown paper, with Messrs. Beit's address label on it, and the post-office dated stamps.

'And the other book has been out a month.' The parson, forgetting the sacerdotal office, and his good habit of grinning, swore at Messrs. Beit and Mr. Ritson, calling them damned thieves, and then began to read the manuscript, and to compare it with the printed book.

'Why, it's splendid work. My poor fellow,' he said after a while, 'I had no notion you could write so well. I used to think of such things in the old days at Oxford; "old Bill," the tutor, used to praise my essays, but I never wrote 76