Her family paid her flying visits during the day, with a freedom unknown in Simeon's reign, and she worked hard at her preparations for renting, but in the evening, when the house was quiet, she settled herself at the study table and made her first attempt at story writing, this time steering clear of the personal note that had brought such swift reprisal the night before. The occupation was absorbing; she neither desired nor missed companionship. She was not the first person to find life's stage amply filled by the puppets of her own imagination.

At the end of the week two things had happened. _The_Illuminator_ had accepted her poem, and her story was finished. She determined to submit it to Stephen, and yet when he looked in at five o'clock, she was ashamed to ask him; what she had thought so well of the night before, in the excitement of work, suddenly seemed to her beneath contempt.