Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/50

 casion. He asked, "Why gray?" She replied, furtively, "He—he always wore black." And Carey never wore anything but gray afterward.

He had the gruff manner with which so many men of diffidence protect themselves in strange approaches. He was much more keen for money in advance and steep royalties than was seemly in the author of Fair Anne Hathaway. He drove a good bargain, because the publishers were certain that they had found a best-seller. And they were right.

The book was an immediate success. Carey took thirty thousand dollars out of it in the first year, and he put the money by for her, in case anything should happen to him. They rented the apartment above their cellar and built an inner staircase to connect the two floors. It was not until after the popularity of The Queen's Quest that they bought the whole house to get rid of the landlady. He furnished the rooms in antiques and surrounded the girl with the interior setting of a Shakespearian comedy mounted by a stage realist. He named her "Rosalind," partly in play, but also in order to disconnect her from her past. Her real name he did not know. He had never asked it. He began to collect the library of Elizabethan and medieval literature upon which he drew so copiously for his later novels. She learned to use the typewriter; and she was, at once, his secretary, his housekeeper, his valet, and his cook.