"Nothing else?"

"Nothing. Except a club I belong to."

"That's something, isn't it? You make friends."

"I don't know anybody in it, except Mr. Jewdwine; and I don't really
know him. It's the shop, you know. You forget the shop."

"No I don't forget it; but I wish you would. If only you could get
away from it, away from everything. If you could get away from London
altogether for a while."

"If--if? I shall never get away."

"Why not? I've been thinking it over. I wonder whether things could
not be made a little easier for you? You ought to make your peace with
the world, you know. Supposing you could go and live where the world
happens to be beautiful, in Rome or Florence or Venice, wouldn't that
reconcile you to reality?"

"It might. But I don't see how I'm to go and live there. You see
there's the shop. There always is the shop."

"Would it be impossible to leave it for a little while?"

"Not impossible, perhaps; but"--he smiled, "well--highly imprudent."

"But if something else were open to you?"

"Nothing else is, at present. Most doors seem closed pretty tight
except the one marked Tradesmen's Entrance."

"You can't 'arrive' by that."

"Not, I admit, with any dignity. My idea was to walk up the
steps--there are a great many steps, I know--to the big front door and
keep on knocking at it till they let me in."

"I'm afraid the front door isn't always open very early in the day.
But there may be side doors."

"I don't know where to find them. And if I did, they would be bolted,
too."

"Not the one I am thinking of. Would you like to go abroad, to Italy?"

"There are a great many things I should like to do, and not the
remotest chance of doing them."

"Supposing that you got the chance, some way--even if it wasn't quite
the best way--would you take it?"

"The chance? I wish I saw one!"

"I think I told you I was going abroad to join my father. We shall be
in Italy for some time. When we are settled, in Rome, for the winter,
I shall want a secretary. I'm thinking of editing my grandfather's
unpublished writings, and I can't do this without a scholar's help. It
struck me that if you want to go abroad, and nothing better turns up,
you might care to take this work for a year. For the sake of seeing
Italy."

Seeing Italy? Italy that he had once desired with all his heart to
see. And now it was nothing to him that he would see Italy; the point
was that he would see her. Talk of open doors! It was dawning on him
that the door of heaven was being opened to him. He could say nothing.
He leaned forward staring at his own loosely clasped hands.

She mistook his silence for hesitation, and it was her turn to become
diffident and shy. "The salary would not be very large, I'm afraid--"

The salary? He smiled. She had opened the door of heaven for him and
she actually proposed to pay him for walking in!

"But there would be no expenses, and you would have space and time. I
should not want your help for more than three or four hours in the
morning. After that you would be absolutely free."

And still he said nothing. But the fine long nervous hands tortured
each other in their clasp. So this was what came of keeping up the
farce?

"Of course," she said, "you must think it over."

"Miss Harden, I don't know how to thank you. I don't know what to
say."

"Don't say anything. Think."

"I don't know what to think."

But he was thinking hard; trying to realize where he was and what was
being proposed to him. To have entertained the possibility of such a
proposal in the middle of last week would have argued that he was
drunk. And here he was indubitably, conspicuously sober. Sober? Well,
not exactly. He ought never to have taken that little cup of black
coffee! Was there any difference between drinking champagne with Miss
Poppy Grace and drinking coffee with Lucia Harden, when the effect was
so indistinguishably the same? Or rather, for completeness and
splendour of hallucination there was no comparison. He was drunk,
drunk as he had never been drunk before, most luminously, most
divinely intoxicated with that little cup of black coffee.

And yet her scheme was entirely in keeping with that ideal and
fantastic world he lived in; a world which in the last six days had
yet, for him, the illusion of reality. He was aware that it _was_
illusion. An illusion which she blindly shared.

He was overcome by the appalling extent of his knowledge and her
ignorance. She thought she was rich; he knew that she was in all
probability poor. She thought a hundred a year (or thereabouts) an
insignificant sum; he knew that before long she might have less than
that to live on. She thought herself at the present moment a wise and
understanding woman. He knew that she was a child. A child playing
with its own beautiful imagination.

He wondered how much of him she understood. Should he tell her that
she did not understand him at all; that she was engaging as her
private secretary a young man who drank, who was quite shockingly
drunk no longer ago than the middle of last week; a young man who was
an intimate friend of a lady whom it was impossible to describe
accurately in her presence? Or did she understand him better than he
understood himself? Had she, with her child's innocence, the divine
lucidity of a child? Did she fail to realize his baser possibilities
because they were the least real part of him? Or was she, in this,
ideal and fantastic too?

Whichever it was, her fascination was so persuasive that he found
himself yielding to her proposal as if it were the most natural thing
in the world. He accepted it as humbly, as gratefully, as gravely, as
if it were a thing actually in her power to bestow. If he could have
suspected her of any intention to patronize him, he could not have
resented it, knowing as he did its pathetic impotence.

"I know it isn't the best way," she said, "but it _is_ a way.

"It's a glorious way."

"I don't know about the glory. But you will see Florence and Venice
and Rome, and they are glorious."

Yes, he would see them, if she said so. Why not? In this ideal and
fantastic world, could any prospect be more ideal and fantastic than
another?

"And you will have plenty of time to yourself. You will be a great
deal alone. Too much alone perhaps. You must think of that. It might
really be better for you to stay in London where you are beginning to
make friends."

Was she trying to break it to him as gently, as delicately as possible
that there would be no intimacy between him and her? That as her
private secretary his privacy would be painfully unbroken?

She saw it and corrected herself. "Friends, I mean, who may be able to
help you more. You must choose between the two advantages. It will be
a complete break with your old life."

"That would be the best thing that could happen to me."

This time she did not see. "Well--don't be in a hurry. There isn't any
hurry. Remember, it means a whole year out of your life."

A whole year out of his life? Was that the way she looked at it?

Yes. She was giving him his chance; but she did not conceive herself
to be giving him anything more. She understood him sufficiently to
trust him; her insight went so far and no farther. She actually
believed that there could be a choice for him between seeing her every
day for a whole year and never seeing her again. Evidently she had not
the remotest conception of his state of mind. He doubted whether it
could have occurred to her to allow for the possibility of her private
secretary falling in love with her in the innermost privacy of his
secretaryship. He saw that hers was not the order of mind that
entertains such possibilities on an intimate footing. She was
generous, large-sighted; he understood that she would let herself be
carried away on the superb sweep of the impersonal, reckless of
contingencies. He also understood that with this particular private
secretary she would consider herself safe. The social difference was
as much her protection as some preposterous incompatibility of age.
And as if that were not enough, in their thoughts they were so akin
that she might feel herself guarded from him by some law of spiritual
consanguinity.

"Oh, my life--" he said with a queer short laugh that sounded like a
sob,--"well, I must be getting back to my work."

"You are _not_ going to work again to-night?"

"I must." Yet he did not get up to go. He seemed to be waiting to say
something. "I--I haven't thanked you. I don't know how to."

"Don't try. I've done nothing. There is little that one person can do
for another."

"There's something that you might do for me--some day--if I might
ask--if you would."

"What is that?"

She followed his gaze as it travelled into the depth of the room
beyond the circle of the lamp-light, where the grand piano stood. Its
keyboard shone in an even band of white, its massive body merged in
the gleaming darkness.

"If you would play to me--some day."

"I will play to you with pleasure." Her voice sounded as if she were
breathing more freely; perhaps she had wondered what on earth he was
going to say. "Now, if you like."

Why not? If she had enjoyed his music, had he not a right to enjoy
hers? Why should she not give him that little pleasure, he who had so
few?

"What shall I play?"

"I should like to hear that thing you were playing the other night."

"Let me think. Oh, the Sonata Appassionata."

"Yes, if it isn't too late." The moment he had said it he reflected
that that was a scruple that might have been better left to the lady.

He watched her grey-white figure departing into the dusk of the room.
He longed to follow, but some fear restrained him. He remained where
he was, leaning back in the deep chair under the lamp while she sat
down there in the dusk, playing to him the Sonata Appassionata.

The space around the lamp grew dim to him; she had gathered into
herself all the whiteness of the flame; the music was a part of her
radiance, it was the singing of her pulses, the rhythm of her breath.

When she had stopped playing he rose and held out his hand to say
good-night.

"Thank you. I don't think so badly of my life now. You've given me one
perfect moment."

"Are you so fond of music?"

She was about to ring when he prevented her.

"Please don't ring. I can find my way. I'd rather."

She judged that he desired to keep the perfection of his moment
unimpaired. She understood his feeling about it, for the Sonata
Appassionata is a most glorious and moving composition, and she had
played it well.

It was true that he desired to be alone; and he took advantage of his
solitude to linger in the picture gallery. He went down the double
row of portraits that began with Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals,
and ended with Sir Frederick, the father of Lucia. He paused at each,
searching for Lucia's likeness in the likeness of those dead and gone
gentlemen and ladies; gentlemen with grave and intellectual faces,
some peevish, others proud (rather like Jewdwine), ladies with faces
joyous, dreamy, sad, voluptuous, tender and insipid, faces alike only
in their indestructible racial distinction. Lucia had taken nothing
from them but what was beautiful and fine; hers was the deep-drawn
unconscious beauty of the race; beauty of flesh and blood purified,
spiritualized in its passage through the generations, beauty that
gives the illusion of eternity, being both younger and older than the
soul. It was as if Nature had become Art in the making of Lucia,
forming her by the subtlest processes of selection and rejection.

Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern
portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room. Sir
Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously,
incredibly like his daughter's (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue
eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference). His eyebrows had a
far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth
and eyes. And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross
and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested
Lucia's with its long-drawn subtle curve.

He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door.
Lucia stood beside him. She had a lamp in her hand which she raised
for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait. Her own
face appeared as if illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of
love.

"That is my father," she said simply, and passed on.

He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the
frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no
affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.

"There are some things," he said to himself, "that she could never
see."




CHAPTER XXV


If Lucia was not, as her father had pronounced her, the worst educated
young woman in Europe, there was a sense (not intended by Sir
Frederick) in which her education might be called incomplete. She had
learnt the things that she liked, and she had left unlearnt the things
that she did not like. It was the method of discreet skipping; and it
answered so well in the world of books that she had applied it to the
world of men and women. She knew the people she liked, and she left
unknown those whom she did not like. Here in Harmouth her peculiar art
or instinct of selection earned for her, as Kitty Palliser had lately
told her, the character of exclusiveness. This, by the way was family
tradition again. From time immemorial there had been a certain
well-recognized distance between Court House and the little Georgian
town. And when Harmouth was discovered by a stock-broker and became a
watering-place, and people began to talk about Harmouth society, Court
House remained innocently unaware that anything of the sort existed.
Lucia selected her friends elsewhere with such supreme fastidiousness
that she could count them on the fingers of one hand, her instinct,
like all great natural gifts, being entirely spontaneous and
unconscious.

And now it seemed she had added Mr. Savage Keith Rickman to the list.
She owned quite frankly that in spite of everything she liked him.

But Rickman was right. Lucia with all her insight had not the remotest
conception of his state of mind. The acquaintance had arisen quite
naturally out of her desire to please Horace, and if on this there
supervened a desire to please Mr. Rickman, there was not a particle
of vanity in it. She had no thought of being Mr. Rickman's
inspiration; her attitude to his genius was humbly reverent, her
attitude to his manhood profoundly unconscious. She had preserved a
most formidable innocence. There had been nothing in Horace Jewdwine's
slow and well-regulated courtship to stir her senses, or give her the
smallest inkling of her own power that way. Kitty's suggestion seemed
to her preposterous; it was only the Kittishness of Kitty, and could
have no possible application to herself.

All this was not humility on her part--nothing of the sort. So far
from being humble, Miss Lucia Harden held the superb conviction that
any course she adopted was consecrated by her adoption. It was as if
she had been aware that her nature was rich, and that she could afford
to do what other women couldn't; "there were ways," she would say, "of
doing them."

And in Mr. Savage Keith Rickman she had divined a nature no less
generously gifted. He could afford to take what she could afford to
offer; better still, he would take just so much and no more. With some
people certain possibilities were moral miracles; and her instinct
told her that this man's mind was incapable of vulgar misconception.
She was safe with him. These things she pondered during that brief
time when Rickman lingered in the portrait gallery.

He saw her again that night for yet another moment. Lucia was called
back into the picture gallery by the voice of Kitty Palliser, whose
return coincided with his departure. Kitty, from the safe threshold of
the drawing-room, looked back after his retreating figure.

"Poor darling, he has dressed himself with care."

"He always does. He has broken every literary convention."

Lucia drew Kitty into the room and shut the door.

"Has he been trying any more experiments in diminished friction on
polished surfaces?"

"No; there was a good deal more repose about him after you left. The
friction was decidedly diminished. What do you think of him?"

"Oh, I rather like the way he drops his aitches. It gives a pathetic
piquancy to his conversation."

"Don't Kitty."

"I won't. But, after all, how do we know that this young man is not a
fraud?"

"How do we know anything?"

"Oh, if you're going to be metaphysical, _I_'m off to my little bed."

"Not yet, Kitty. Sit down and toast your toes. I want to talk to you."

"All right, fire away."

But Lucia hesitated; Kitty was in an unpropitious mood.

"What do you think I've done?" she said.

Kitty's green eyes danced merrily; but in spite of their mockery Lucia
told her tale.

"It was the best I could do," said she.

Kitty's eyes had left off dancing.

"Lucia, you _can't_. It's impossible. You must _not_ go on being so
kind to people. Remember, dear, if he is a heaven-born genius, he's
not--he really _is_ not a gentleman."

"I know. I've thought of that. But if he isn't a gentleman, he isn't
the other thing. He's something by himself.

"I admit he's a genius, but--he drops his aitches."

"He doesn't drop half as many as he did. He only does it when he's
flustered. And I won't let him be flustered. I shall be very kind to
him."

"Oh," groaned Kitty, "there's no possible doubt about that."

"On the whole I think I'm rather glad he isn't a gentleman. He would
be much more likely to get in my way if he were. I don't believe this
little man would get in my way. He's got eyes at the back of his head,
and nerves all over him; he'd see in a minute when I didn't want him.
He'd see it before I did, and be off."

"You don't know. You might have to be very unpleasant to him before
you said good-bye."

"No, I should never have to be unpleasant to him; because he would
know that would be very unpleasant for me."

"All this might mean that he was a gentleman; but I'm afraid it only
means that he's a genius."

"Genius of that sort," said Lucia, "comes to very much the same
thing." And Kitty reluctantly admitted that it did. She sat silent for
some minutes gazing into the fire.

"Lucia, does it never occur to you that in your passion for giving
pleasure you may be giving a great deal of pain?"

"It doesn't occur to me that I'm giving either in this case; and it
will not occur to him. He knows I'm only giving him his chance. I owe
it him. Kitty--when you only think what I've done. I've taken this
wonderful, beautiful, delicate thing and set it down to the most
abominable drudgery for three weeks. No wonder he was depressed. And I
took his Easter from him--Kitty--think--his one happy breathing-time
in the whole hateful year."

"Whitsuntide and Christmas yet remain."

"They're not at all the same thing."

"That's you, Lucy, all over; you bagged his Bank Holiday, and you
think you've got to give him a year in Italy to make up."

"Not altogether to make up."

"Well, I don't know what to say. There's no doubt you can do a great
many things other women can't; still, it certainly seems a risky thing
to do."

"How risky?"

"I don't want to be coarse, but--I'm not humbugging this
time--supposing, merely supposing--he falls in love with you, what
then?"

"But he won't."

"How do you know?"

"Because he's in love already, in love with perfection."

"But as he'll be sure to identify perfection with you--"

"He will see very little of me."

"Then he's all the more likely to."

"Kitty, _am_ I the sort of woman who allows that sort of thing to
happen--with that sort of man?"

"My dear, you're the sort of woman who treats men as if they were
disembodied spirits, and that's the most dangerous sort I know. If
I'm not mistaken Mr. Savage Keith Rickman's spirit is very much
embodied."

"What _is_ the good of trying to make me uncomfortable when it's all
settled? I can't go back on my word."

"No, I suppose you've got to stick to it. Unless, of course, your
father interferes."

"Father never interferes. Did you ever know him in his life refuse me
anything I wanted?"

"I can't say I ever did." Kitty's tone intimated that perhaps it would
have been better if he sometimes had. "Still, Sir Frederick objects
strongly to people who interfere with him, and he may not care to have
the young Savage poet, or poet Savage, hanging about."

"Father? He won't mind a bit. He says he's going to take part of the
Palazzo Barberini for six months. It's big enough to hold fifty
poets."

"Not big enough to hold one like Mr. Savage Keith Rickman." Kitty rose
to her feet; she stood majestic, for the spirit of prophecy was upon
her; she gathered herself together for the deliverance of her soul.
"You say he won't be in the way. He will. He'll be most horribly in
the way. He'll go sliding and falling all over the place, and dashing
cups of coffee on the marble floor of the Palazzo; he'll wind his feet
in the tails of your best gowns, not out of any malice, but in sheer
nervous panic; he'll do unutterable things with soup--I can see him
doing them."

"I can't."

"No. I know you can't. I don't say you've no imagination; but I _do_
say you're deficient in a certain kind of profane fancy."




CHAPTER XXVI


It was extraordinary; if he had given himself time to reflect on it he
might even have considered it uncanny, the peace that had settled on
him with regard to the Harden Library.

It remained absolutely unshaken by the growing agitation of his
father's letters. Isaac wrote reproachfully, irritably, frantically,
and received only the briefest, most unsatisfactory replies. "I can't
tell you anything more than I have. But I wouldn't be in a hurry to
make any arrangements with Pilkington, if I were you." Not the
smallest reference to the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace or the
_Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde.

Why indeed should he trouble himself? He couldn't understand his
father's state of mind. He had now a positive intuition that Sir
Frederick would recover in the manner of a gentleman whose motto was
_Invictus_; an infinite assurance was conveyed by that tilted
faun-like smile. He even found himself believing in his own delightful
future as Miss Harden's private secretary, so entirely had he
submitted to the empire of divine possibility.

Meanwhile he redoubled his attentions to the catalogue. (Could there
be anything more unreasonable than that catalogue _raisonné_?) He had
frequently got up and worked at it for an hour or two before
breakfast, lifted out of bed by the bounding of his heart. But whereas
he had been in the habit of leaving it at any time between nine
o'clock and midnight, he now sat up with it till the small hours of
the morning. This extreme devotion was necessary if he was to finish
it by the twenty-seventh. It was now the fifteenth.

He had told Miss Harden that he could work better by himself, and
apparently she had taken him at his word; she had left him to finish
the catalogue alone. As it happened he didn't work a bit better by
himself. What with speculating on the chance of her appearing,
listening for her voice and her footsteps on the stairs, or the
distant sound of her playing, to say nothing of his desperate efforts
not to stare out of the windows when he knew her to be in the garden,
Lucia absent was even more disturbing than Lucia on the spot. He tried
to console himself with the reflection that she was no longer
overworking herself; and herein appeared the great purity and
self-abnegation of Mr. Rickman's love. Rather than see her making
herself ill, he was actually manoeuvring so as not to see her at all.
He kept his vigils secret, having a suspicion that if she heard of
them she would insist on returning to her hideous task.

To this end he devised an ingenious system of deceit. He left off work
for an hour every afternoon, alleging his need of air and exercise. He
then asked permission to sit up a little later than usual by way of
making good the time thus lost. He knew that by eleven the lights
would be out, and Lucia and the servants all in bed. He demanded black
coffee to keep him awake and the key of the side door to let himself
out. All on the understanding that he would leave the house by
half-past eleven or twelve at the latest. He could thus put in a good
five hours extra without any one being any the wiser; and four o'clock
would find Mr. Rickman stealing back to his hotel over the grey and
dewy grass.

For three days and three nights love's miraculous energy sustained
him. On the fourth night he was overcome by a slight fatigue, and at
one o'clock he lay down on the hearth rug to sleep, registering in his
brain his intention to wake punctually at two.

And for three days and three nights Lucia hardly gave a thought to Mr.
Rickman. She was busy with preparations for her departure, trying to
see as much of Kitty Palliser as possible, and thinking a great deal
of that adorable father whom she would meet on the twenty-seventh.

Lucia's room, as Mr. Rickman knew, was in the west wing, over the
south-west end of the library, and from her window she could see the
pale yellow green shaft of light that Mr. Rickman's lamp flung across
the lawn. The clock on the stable belfry struck the hours one by one,
and Lucia, fast asleep, never knew that the shaft of light lay there
until the dawn.

On the fourth night, the night of Thursday, the fifteenth, Lucia did
not sleep so well. She dreamed, but her dreams were too light and
transparent to veil the reality that lay on the waking side of them.
Three times that night she started on her journey to Cannes, three
times she missed her train, and three times she said to herself, "It's
only a dream, so of course it doesn't matter." When, after prodigious
efforts extending over interminable time, she found herself on
Harmouth platform, shuddering in her nightgown before a whole train
full of people, she was not in the least disconcerted, because of her
perception of that reality behind her dream; no, not even when Mr.
Rickman appeared just as she was saying to herself, "It doesn't
matter. This is only the fifteenth and I don't really start till the
twenty-sixth." His presence was so transparent, so insubstantial, that
it didn't seem to matter either. He said, "Miss 'Arden, you've made a
miscalculation. You must start this minute if you're to be there in
time." His statement seemed to her to be founded on some solid
reality; but when she asked him what he was doing there, he spoilt it
all by saying that as private secretary he was in charge of the
expedition. By that, and by something unnatural and absurd in his
appearance, she knew that she was dreaming. Then, for more time than
she could measure, she lay watching herself dream, with a curious
sense of being able to foretell and control the fantastic procession
of events.

And now she was aware of something that moved with their movement, a
trouble or a terror that hovered out there, not on the waking border
but in the region of reality that lay on the other side. Almost
discernible behind the transparent insubstantial walls of sleep, it
waited to break through them and invade her dream. For refuge from it
she plunged deeper into her dream. She came out walking on a terrace
of grey grass set with strange clusters of swords, sharp-pointed and
double-edged. Tall grey trees shot up into a grey white sky; they
were coated with sharp scales, grey and toothed like the scales of a
shark's skin; and some bore yet more swords for branches, slender and
waving swords; and some, branchless, were topped with heads of curled
scimitars, the blades pointing downwards. All these scaly, spiky,
two-edged things stood out piercing and distinct against the grey; and
she knew that they were aloes and palm-trees, and that she had come to
the end of her journey and was walking in the garden of the Villa des
Palmes. And the thing she dreaded was still waiting a little way
beyond the garden, beyond the insubstantial walls; it was looking for
her, crying after her, it stretched out its arms to draw her from her
sleep.

A little twilight wind came creeping over the grey grass, it covered
her feet like water, it rose higher and higher above the sword points
of the aloes, and she sank in it and floated, floated and sank. And
now it tossed and rolled and shook the palm-trees till all their
blades rattled like steel; and beyond the wind she heard the calling
of the thing she feared, the thing that had hunted her from dream to
dream. She feared it no longer; she too was looking and crying; all
her desire was to find what she had feared; to answer it, to see it
face to face. Her body was clasped tight by the arms of the wind; yet
her yearning was so strong that she struggled with them and flung them
from her, breaking through the bonds and barriers of sleep.

Lucia was awake and accounting for her dream. The weather had changed
in the night, and a cold wind was rushing through the open window on
to her bed. She had been lying with her feet uncovered, and the
bed-clothes heaped on to her chest. She had been waked by the rattling
of a loosened lattice in the room below. She got out of bed and looked
out of the window. There was a vast movement in the sky, as if the
darkness were being visibly upheaved and rolled away westwards by the
wind. Over the garden was the dense grey blackness of an obliterated
dawn. The trees, not yet detached from the ground of night, showed
like monstrous skeletons of the whole immense body of gloom, while the
violent rocking of their branches made them one with that dark and
wandering tumult of cloud and wind.

The shaft of light no longer lay upon the lawn; Mr. Rickman's lamp
was out; therefore, she argued, Mr. Rickman had gone; having, in the
recklessness of his genius, forgotten to close the library windows.

One of the west windows creaked and crashed by turns as it swung
heavily in its leaded frame. Lucia put on her dressing gown and
slippers, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went down to
fasten the lattice. A small swinging lamp gave light to the hall and
staircase. A gleam followed her into the library; it lay in a pool
behind her, its thin stream lost in the blackness of the floor. She
could distinguish nothing in the room but the three dim white busts on
their dusky pedestals. Behind the latticework the window panes were
like chequered sheets of liquid twilight let down over the face of the
night.

The wind held the open lattice backwards, and she had some difficulty
in reaching the hasp. A shallow gust ran over the floor, chilling her
half-naked feet. As she leaned out on the sill a great fear came over
her, the fear that had always possessed her in childhood at the coming
and passing of the night. As she struggled with the lattice, she had a
sense of pulling it against some detaining hand. It swung slowly round
and the figure of a man slid with it side-long, and stood behind it
looking in. The figure seemed to lean forward out of the darkness; its
face, pressed close against the panes, was vivid, as if seen in a
strong daylight. She saw the flame of its red moustache and hair, the
flicker of its faun-like tilted smile. Its eyes were fixed piercingly
on hers.

It stood so for the space of six heart-beats. The window slipped from
her hand and swung back on its hinges. The cloud was heaved from the
edges of the world, and face and figure were wiped out by the great
grey sweep of the dawn. Lucia (strangely as it seemed to her
afterwards) was not startled by the apparition, but by the aspect of
the world it had appeared in. She stood motionless, as if afraid of
waking her own fear; she caught the lattice, drew it towards her and
deliberately secured it by the hasp. She turned with relief from the
terrible twilight of the windows to the darkness of the room. She
crossed it with slow soft footsteps, lest she should give her terror
the signal to pursue.

There was a slight stir on the hearth as a mound of ashes sank and
broke asunder, opening its dull red heart.

Lucia turned in the direction of the sound, came forward and saw that
she was not alone.

Stretched on the rug in front of the fireplace with his feet towards
her lay Mr. Rickman.

Her first feeling was of relief, protection, deliverance. She stood
looking at him, finding comfort in the sheer corporeality of his
presence. But as she looked at him that emotion merged in concern for
Mr. Rickman himself. He lay on his back in a deep sleep; one arm was
flung above his head, the hand brushing back his damp hair; his
forehead was beaded with the thick sweat of exhaustion. He must have
been lying so for hours, having dropped off to sleep when the night
was still warm. He had thrown back his coat and loosened his
shirt-collar, and lay undefended from the draught that raked the
floor. The window at this end of the room had been left open too, and
the fire was almost dead.

Lucia looked doubtfully at the window. She knew its ways; it sagged on
its hinges and was not to be shut without the grating shriek of iron
upon stone. She looked, still more doubtfully, at Mr. Rickman. His
face in the strange light showed white and sharp and pathetically
refined.

And as she looked her heart was filled with compassion for the
helpless sleeper. She moved very softly to the fireplace, where an oak
chest stood open stored with wood; she gathered the embers together
and laid on them a few light logs. The first log dropped through the
ashes to the hearth, and Mr. Rickman heaved a deep sigh and turned on
his side.

Lucia knelt there motionless, till his breathing assured her that he
still slept. With swift noiseless movements she went on building up
the dying fire. The wood crackled; a little flame leapt up, and Mr.
Rickman opened his eyes. For a moment he kept them open, fixed in
sleepy wonder on the woman who knelt beside him by the hearth. He was
obscurely aware that it was Lucia Harden, but his wonder was free from
the more vivid and disturbing element of surprise; for he had been
dreaming about her and was still under the enchantment of his dream.
Never had she seemed more beautiful to him.

Her head was bowed, her face turned from him and shaded by her hair;
and with her hands she tended a dying flame. Her shawl had slipped
from her shoulders, and he saw the delicate curve of her body as she
knelt; it was overlaid by her hair that fell to her hips in a loose
flat braid. He closed his eyes again, feigning abysmal sleep. He kept
guard over his breath, over his eyelids, lest a tremor should startle
her into shame-faced flight. Yet he knew that she had risen and that
her face was set towards him; that she turned from him and then paused
in her going; that she looked at the fire again to make sure of its
burning, and at him to make sure of his sleep (so intently that she
never noticed the white thing which had slipped from her shoulders as
she stood upright); that she stooped to draw his coat more closely
over him. He heard the flowing of her gown, and saw without seeing her
feet shining as she went from him.

And his desire went after her, and the mere bodiless idea of her
became a torment to his body as it had been a joy to his soul.

He took up her shawl which lay there by the hearth and looked at it;
he stroked it, unfolded it, spread it out and looked at it again; he
held it to his face; its whiteness and its tender texture were as
flame to his sight and touch, the scarcely perceptible scent of it
pierced him like a delicate pain. He gathered it up again in a heap
and covered it with kisses. Then, because it made his longing for her
insupportable, he flung it back, that innocent little white shawl, as
if shaking off her touch and her presence.

He rose to his feet and ramped up and down the room savagely, like a
wild animal in a cage. With every thought of Lucia his torment
returned upon him. He tried to think of the whiteness and the beauty
of her soul, and he could think of nothing but the whiteness of her
face and the beauty of her bending body.

He sat down, stretched his arms on the table and laid his miserable
head upon them, all among the pages of the catalogue _raisonné_. He
had passed from his agony of desire to an agony of contrition. He felt
that the very vehemence of his longing was an affront to her white
unconsciousness Up till now he had not admitted that he was "in love"
with Lucia; he was indeed hardly aware of it. He imagined his feeling
for her to be something altogether immaterial and incorruptible. It
now seemed to him that in the last few minutes he had lowered it
almost to the level of the emotion inspired by Miss Poppy Grace. It
was not, and it never could be, what it had been three weeks ago. Why,
he could not even recall his sensations of Easter Sunday, that strange
renewal of his heart's virginity his first vague imperfect vision of
the dawn of love, his joy when he discerned its tender and mysterious
approach. He knew that it held no rights, or held them only on the
most subtle and uncertain tenure, that his soul touched the soul of
Lucia Harden by the extreme tips of its wings stretched to the utmost.
Still his passion for her had been, so far, satisfied by that
difficult and immaterial relationship. He was bound to her by an
immaterial, intangible link.

But he had put an end to that relationship; he had broken the
immaterial, intangible link. It was as if he had given a body to some
delicate and spiritual dream, and destroyed it in a furious embrace.
And in destroying it he had destroyed everything.

Then he reflected that though this deed seemed to belong wholly to the
present moment, it had in reality been done a long time before, when
he first became the slave of that absurd and execrable passion for
Miss Poppy Grace. Rickman the poet had believed in Love, the immortal
and invincible, the highest of high divinities, and as such had
celebrated him in song. But he had been unfortunate in his first
actual experience of him. He had found him, not "pacing Heaven's
golden floor," but staggering across Miss Grace's drawing-room, a most
offensive, fifth-rate, disreputable little god. Of course he knew it
wasn't the same thing, it wasn't the same thing at all. But he was
bound by his past. He had forged a chain of infamous but irresistible
association that degraded love in his eyes, that in his thoughts
degraded _her_. Every hour that he had spent in the little dancer's
society had its kindred with this hour. In his passion for Lucia
Harden there leapt up the passion of that night--that night three
weeks ago. It was then--then--that he had sinned against her.

He had not meant--he had not meant to love her--like that. And yet he
perceived how all along, unremittently, imperceptibly, this passion
had waylaid him and misled him and found him out. It was it that had
drawn him every morning across the fields to Court House, that upheld
him on his giddy perch on the library steps, that chained him to his
chair at the library table and kept him sweating over that abominable
catalogue till four o'clock in the morning. It had looked at him with
so pure and spiritual a face that he had not recognized it. But how
otherwise could he have stayed here for three weeks, fooling with that
unlucky conscience of his; persuading it one minute that he had
nothing to do with Miss Harden, and that her father's affairs were no
business of his, the next that they were so much his business that he
was bound not to betray them; while as for Miss Harden, he had so much
to do with her that it was his duty to stay where he was and protect
her? He had had absolutely no duty in the matter except to tell her
the truth and clear out.

Telling the truth--it ought to have been easy for him who was so
truthful, so passionately sincere. And yet almost anything would have
been easier, for the next step to telling the truth was going away. Of
course he had suffered in staying, but he would have suffered anything
rather than go.

It had been so insidious. His feet had been caught in a net so fine
that he had thought it woven of the hairs split by an exceedingly
acute and subtle conscience. He should have stood still and snapt them
one by one; but he had struggled, until he was so entangled that he
could not get out. And now he perceived that the net which seemed so
fine was the strong net woven by desire. All his subtle reasonings,
his chivalry, his delicacy, his sincerity itself, could be reduced to
this simple and contemptible element. Positively, his whole character,
as he now contemplated it seemed to slip away from him and dissolve in
the irresistible stream, primeval, monstrous, indestructible.

The horror of his position returned upon him, the burden of his
knowledge and her ignorance. If only she knew, if only he could go to
her and tell her everything, all that he knew and all that he guessed!
He was still firm in his conviction that he had no moral right to his
knowledge; it was a thing he almost seemed to have come by
dishonestly. If Miss Harden knew nothing of her father's affairs, it
was to be presumed that they had been purposely kept from her to save
her pain. He had no right to tell her.

No matter, he would tell her, he would tell her this morning, and
having told her, he would go away.

He got up and paced to and fro again. He stood before the open window
till he had chilled himself through; then he came back and cowered
over the fire. A white thing lay by the hearth at his feet, it was
Lucia Harden's shawl, lying crumpled where he had thrown it. It was
the sign and symbol of her presence there. It was also the proof of
it.

How would she feel if she knew that he had been aware of it all the
time? The fact remained that she had risked his waking; there was
comfort for him in that. She had always been kind to him, and he had
never had even a momentary illusion as to the source and the nature of
her kindness. He had taken it, as he had taken her extreme courtesy,
for the measure of the distance that divided them. It showed her
secure in her detachment, her freedom from any intimate thought of
him, from any thought of him at all. But in this last act of kindness
it could hardly be that she had not taken him into consideration. She
could hardly have been pleased if she knew he had been awake, yet she
had risked his waking. Before she risked it she must have credited him
with something of her own simplicity of soul.

And this was how he had repaid her.

He saw her as she had knelt by him, mending the dying fire, as she had
stood looking at him, as she had stooped over him to cover him, and as
she had turned away; and he saw himself, sinning as he had sinned
against her in his heart.

He knew perfectly well that the average man would have felt no
compunction whatever upon this head. To the average man his
imagination (if he has any) is an unreal thing; to Rickman it was the
most real thing about him. It was so young, and in its youth so
ungovernably creative, that it flung out its ideas, as it were, alive
and kicking. It was only partially true of him that his dream was
divorced from reality. For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to
the average man are merely phantoms), projected themselves with a
bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and
authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality
denied to facts. His imagination was in this so far spiritual that it
perceived desire to be the eternal soul of the deed, and the deed to
be but the perishing body of desire. From this point of view, conduct
may figure as comparatively unimportant; therefore this point of view
is very properly avoided by the average man.

Rickman, now reduced to the last degree of humility and contrition,
picked up Lucia's shawl very gently and reverently, and folded it with
care, smoothing out the horrid creases he had made in it. He took it
to the other end of the room and laid it over the back of her chair,
so that it might look to Robert as if his mistress had left it there.

Would he see her again that morning? That depended on the amount of
work that remained for her to do. He looked over her table; her tray
was empty, the slips were pinned together in bundles in the way he had
taught her, Section XII, Poetry, was complete. There was nothing now
to keep her in the library. And he had only ten days' work to do. He
might see her once or twice perhaps on those days; but she would not
sit with him, nor work with him, and when the ten days were over she
would go away and he would never see her again.

Then he remembered that he had got to tell her and go away himself, at
once, this very morning.

Meanwhile he sat down and worked till it was time to go back to his
hotel. He worked mechanically, miserably, oppressed alike by his sense
of his own villainy and of the futility of his task. He did not know
how, when it was ended, he was to take up this kind of work again. He
had only been kept up by his joy in her presence, and in her absence
by the hope of her return. But he could not bear to look into a future
in which she had no part.




CHAPTER XXVII


He found a letter from Dicky Pilkington waiting for him at the hotel.
Dicky's subtlety seemed to have divined his scruples, for he gave him
the information he most wanted in terms whose terseness left very
little room for uncertainty. "Look sharp," wrote Dicky, "and let me
know if you've made up your great mind about that library. If Freddy
Harden doesn't pay up I shall have to put my men in on the
twenty-seventh. Between you and me there isn't the ghost of a chance
for Freddy. I hear the unlucky devil's just cleaned himself out at
Monte Carlo."

The twenty-seventh? It was the day when Miss Harden was to join her
father at Cannes. The coincidence of dates was significant; it
amounted to proof. It meant that Sir Frederick must have long
anticipated the catastrophe, and that he had the decency to spare her
the last painful details. She would not have to witness the invasion
of the Vandals, the overturning of the household gods, and the
defilement of their sacred places.

Well, he thought bitterly, they couldn't be much more defiled than
they were already. He saw himself as an abominable object, a thing
with a double face and an unclean and aitchless tongue, sitting there
from morning to night, spying, calculating, appraising, with a view to
fraud. At least that was how she would think of him when she knew; and
he had got to tell her.

He was on the rack again; and the wonder was how he had ever left it.
It seemed to him that he could never have been long released at any
time. He had had moments of comparative ease, when he could lie on it
at one end of the room and see Lucia sitting at the other, and the
sight of her must have soothed his agony. He had had moments of
forgetfulness, of illusion, when he had gone to sleep on the rack, and
had dreamed the most delicious dreams, moments even of deliverance,
when his conscience, exhausted with the sheer effort of winding, had
dropped to sleep too. And then had come the reckless moments, when he
had yielded himself wholly to the delight of her presence; and that
supreme instant when his love for Lucia seemed to have set him free.

And now it was love itself, furiously accusing, that flung him back
upon the torture, and stretched him out further than he had been
stretched before.

But Dicky's letter had to be answered at once. He settled Dicky for
the present by reminding him that nothing could be done by either of
them till the twenty-seventh. But he thought that if Sir Frederick or
any of his family were unable to pay up, there ought to be no
difficulty in arranging with his father.

To his father he sent a word of warning. "For Goodness' sake don't
commit yourself with Pilkington until you see me. I shall probably be
back in town to-morrow afternoon!"

Having settled Dicky, he breakfasted, bathed, was a little long over
his dressing, taking care that nothing in his appearance should
suggest the dishevelled person of the dawn. Thus he was rather later
than usual in presenting himself at the library. He found Miss Harden
there at his end of the table, with his note-book, busy over his pile
and engaged in finishing his Section--Philosophy. Her clear and candid
eyes greeted him without a shadow of remembrance. She had always this
air of accepting him provisionally, for the moment only, as if her
kindness had no springs in the past and could promise nothing for the
future. He had always found this manner a little distressing, and it
baffled him completely now. Still, in another minute he would have to
tell her, whatever her manner or her mood.

"Miss Harden," he began, "you've been so awfully good to me, there's
something that I want most awfully to say to you."

"Well, say it." But there was that in her tone which warned him not to
be too long about it.

"It's something I ought to have said--to have confessed--ages ago--"

"Oh no, really Mr. Rickman, if it's a confession, you mustn't do it
now. We shall never finish at this rate."

"When may I?"

"Some time in the afternoon, perhaps." Her smile, which was
exceedingly subtle, disconcerted him inexpressibly. She turned at once
to the business of the day. The question was whether he would begin on
a new section, or finish this one with her, writing at her dictation?

He too was calm, business-like, detached. He strangled a happy smile
which suggested that her question was absurd. To start a new section
was to work gloomily by himself, at some distant quarter of the room;
to write to her dictation was to be near her, soothed by her voice and
made forgetful by her eyes. Hypocritically he feigned a minute's
reflection, as if it were a matter for hesitation and for choice.

"Wouldn't you find it less tiring if I read and you wrote?"

"No, I had better read. You can write faster than I can."

So he wrote his fastest, while Lucia Harden read out titles to him in
the sonorous Latin tongue. She was standing ankle-deep in Gnostics and
Neo-Platonists; as for Mr. Rickman, he was, as he observed, out of his
depth there altogether.

"Iamblichus, _De Mysteriis Egyptiorum_. Do you know him?"

Mr. Rickman smiled as he admitted that his acquaintance with
Iamblichus was of the slightest; Lucia laughed as she confessed an
ignorance extending to the very name. He noticed that she always
seemed pleased when she had any ignorance to own up to; had she found
out that this gave pleasure to other people?

"Is he Philosophy, or is he Religion?" She invariably deferred to
Rickman on a question of classification. She handed the book to him.
"Can you tell?"

"I really don't know; he seems to be both. I'd better have a look at
him." He turned over the pages, glancing at the text. "I say, listen
to this."

He hit on a passage at random, and read out the Greek, translating
fluently.

"'If then the presence of the divine fire and the unspeakable form of
the divine light descend upon a man, wholly filling and dominating
him, and encompassing him on every side, so that he can in no way
carry on his own affairs, what sense or understanding or perception of
ordinary matters should he have who has received the divine fire?' Can
he be referring to the business capacity of poets?"

Lucia listened amused. And all the time he was thinking, "If I don't
tell her now I shall never tell her. She'll sneak off with Miss
Palliser somewhere in the afternoon." Neither noticed that Robert had
come in and was standing by with a telegram. Robert gazed at Mr.
Rickman with admiration, while he respectfully waited for the end of
the paragraph; that, he judged, being the proper moment for attracting
his mistress' attention.

Never in all his life would Rickman forget that passage in the _De
Mysteriis_ which he had not been thinking about. As Lucia took the
telegram she was still looking at Rickman and the smile of amusement
was still on her face. Robert respectfully withdrew. Lucia opened the
envelope and Rickman looked down, apparently absorbed in Iamblichus.
He was now considering in what form of words he would tell her.

Then, without looking up, he knew that something had happened. His
first feeling was that it had happened to himself. He could not say
how or why or what was the precise moment of its happening; he only
knew that she had been talking to him, listening to him, smiling at
him, and that then something had swept him on one side and carried her
away, he did not know where, except that it was beyond his reach.

He looked up, startled by a sudden change in her breathing. She was
standing opposite him; she seemed to be keeping herself upright by her
hands pressed palms downwards on the table. The telegram was spread
open there before her; and she was not looking at it; she was looking
straight at him, but without seeing him. Her mouth was so tightly
closed that it might have been the pressure of her lips that drove
the blood from them; she breathed heavily through her nostrils, her
small thin breast heaving without a sob. In her face there was neither
sorrow nor terror, and he could see that there was no thought in her
brain, and that all the life in her body was gathered into her
swollen, labouring heart. And as he looked at her he was pierced with
a great pang of pity.

She stood there so, supporting herself by her hands for about a
minute. He was certain that no sense of his presence reached her
across the gulf of her unknown and immeasurable anguish.

At last she drew her hands from the table, first one, then the other,
slowly, as if she were dragging a weight; her body swayed, and he
sprang to his feet with an inarticulate murmur, and held out one arm
to steady her. At his touch her perishing will revived and her
faintness passed from her. She put him gently aside and went slowly
out of the room.

As he turned to the table the five words of her telegram stared him in
the face: "Your father died this morning."

It would have been horrible if he had told her.

His first thought was for her; and he thanked Heaven that had tied his
tongue. Then, try as he would to realize her suffering, it eluded him;
he could only feel that a moment ago she had been with him, standing
there and smiling, and that now he was alone. He could still feel her
hand pushing against his outstretched arm. There had been nothing to
wound him in that gesture of repulse; it was as if she had accepted
rather than refused his touch, as if her numbed body took from it the
impetus it craved.

There was a sound of hurry and confusion in the house; servants went
up and downstairs, or stood about whispering in the passages. He heard
footsteps in that room above him which he knew to be her room. A bell
rang once; he could feel the vibration of the wire down the wall of
the library. It was her bell and he wondered if she were ill.

Robert rushed in with a wild white face, shaken out of his respectful
calm. He was asking Rickman if he had seen this month's Bradshaw. They
joined in a frenzied search for it.

She was not ill; she was going away.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of wheels grating on the gravel
drive, of the front door being flung open, of her voice, her sweet
quiet voice, then the grating of the wheels again, and she was gone.
That, of course, ended it.

Now for the first time he realized what Sir Frederick's death meant
for himself. In thus snatching her from him in the very crisis of
confession it had taken away his chance of redeeming his dishonour.

If he had only told her!




CHAPTER XXVIII


He did not go back to town on the seventh, after all. He stayed to
finish roughly, brutally almost, with the utmost possible dispatch,
the disastrous catalogue, which would now be required, whatever
happened. Until every book in the library had passed through his hands
he was hardly in a position to give a just estimate of its value. His
father had written again in some perturbation. It seemed that the old
song for which he might obtain the Harden library went to the tune of
one thousand pounds; but Pilkington was asking one thousand two
hundred. "It's a large sum," wrote Isaac, "and without more precise
information than you've given me yet, I can't tell whether we should
be justified in paying it."

That confirmed his worst misgivings. He answered it very precisely
indeed. "We shouldn't be morally justified in paying less than four
thousand for such a collection; and we should make a pretty big profit
at that. But if we can't afford the price we must simply withdraw. In
fact I consider that we ought to hold back in any case until we see
whether Miss Harden or any of her people are going to come forward.
It's only fair to give them the chance. You can expect me on the
twentieth."

Beside writing to his father, he had done the only honest and
straightforward thing that was left for him to do. He had written to
Horace Jewdwine. That was indeed what he ought to have done at the
very first. He could see it now, the simple, obvious duty that had
been staring him in the face all the time. He hardly cared to think
what subtle but atrocious egoism of passion had prevented him from
disclosing to Jewdwine the fact of his presence at Court House; even
now he said nothing about the two weeks that he had spent working with
Jewdwine's cousin. The catalogue _raisonné_ was so bound up with the
history of his passion that the thing had become a catalogue
_raisonné_ of its vicissitudes. Some instinct, not wholly selfish,
told him that the least said about that the better. He wrote on the
assumption that Jewdwine knew (as he might very well have done) the
truth about the Harden library, briefly informing him that they,
Rickman's, had been or rather would be in treaty with Mr. Pilkington
for the purchase; but that he, Savage Keith Rickman, considered it was
only fair to suggest that Mr. Jewdwine or some other member of Sir
Frederick Harden's family should have the option of buying it,
provided it could be so arranged with Mr. Pilkington. As Jewdwine was
probably aware, the library represented security for one thousand
pounds; whereas Rickman estimated its market value at four or even
five times as much. But as Mr. Pilkington was not inclined to let it
go for less than one thousand two hundred, Jewdwine had better be
prepared to offer a little more than that sum. If Jewdwine felt
inclined to act on this suggestion Rickman would be glad if he would
let him know within the next ten days; as otherwise his father would
be obliged to close with Mr. Pilkington in due form after the
twenty-seventh. Would he kindly wire an acknowledgement of the letter?

Jewdwine had wired from London, "Thanks. Letter received; will write."
That was on the seventeenth, and it was now the twenty-seventh and
Jewdwine had not written. Rickman should have been back in London long
before that time; he had allowed himself four days to finish his
horrible work; and he had finished it. But as it happened the end of
twelve days found him still in Harmouth. Seven of them passed without
his being very vividly aware of them, though up till now he had kept a
strict account of time. Two weeks once struck off the reckoning, he
had come down to calculating by days, by hours, by half hours, to
measuring minutes as if they had been drops of some precious liquid
slowly evaporating. And now he had let a whole week go by without
comment, while he lay in bed in his room at the Marine Hotel, doing
nothing, not even sleeping. For seven days Mr. Rickman had been ill.
The broad term nervous fever was considered to have sufficiently
covered all his symptoms.

They were not improved by the discovery that Jewdwine had failed to
give any sign; while the only reply sent by Rickman's was a brief note
from his father to the effect that Keith's letter should have his very
best consideration, and that by the time he saw him he would no doubt
be in a better position to answer it. There was a postcard written on
the twenty-first, inquiring the cause of his non-appearance on the
twentieth. This had been answered by the doctor. It had been followed
by a letter of purely parental solicitude, in which all mention of
business was avoided. Avoided; and it was now the twenty-seventh.

Rickman literally flung from his sick-bed a feverish and illegible
note to Horace Jewdwine. "For God's sake, wire me what you mean to
do," an effort which sent his temperature up considerably. He passed
these days of convalescence in an anxious watching for the post. To
the chambermaid, to the head waiter, to the landlord and landlady of
the Marine Hotel, to the friendly commercial gentleman, who put his
head twice a day round the door to inquire "'ow he was gettin' on,"
Mr. Rickman had during his seven days' illness put the same unvarying
question. These persons had adopted a policy of silence, shaking their
heads or twisting their mouths into the suggestion of a "No," by way
of escape from the poignancy of the situation. But on the afternoon of
the twenty-ninth, Mr. Rickman being for the first time up and dressed,
Tom, the waiter, replied to the accustomed query with a cheerful "No
sir, no letters; but a lady was inquiring for you this morning, sir."
In Tom's mind a lady and a letter amounted to very much the same
thing.

"Do you know who it was?"

"Yes sir, Miss Palliser."

"Miss Parry? I don't know any Miss Parry," said Rickman wearily.

"I didn't say Miss Parry, sir I said Miss Palliser, sir. Wanted to
know 'ow you was; I said you was a trifle better, sir."

"I? I'm all right. I think I shall go out and take a walk." The
violent excitement of his veins and nerves gave him the illusion of
recovered strength.

His walk extended from the hotel door to a seat on the seafront
opposite. He repeated it the next morning with less difficulty, and
even succeeded in reaching a further seat beyond the range of the
hotel windows. There he sat looking at the sea, and watching without
interest the loiterers on the esplanade. At last, by sheer repetition,
three figures forced themselves on his attention; two ladies, one
young, the other middle-aged, and a clergyman, who walked incessantly
up and down. They were talking as they passed him; he caught the man's
steep-pitched organ monotone, "Yes, I shall certainly go up to the
house and see her," and the girl's voice that answered in a hard
bright trill, "You won't see her. She hasn't seen any body but Kitty
Palliser."

The blood boiled in his brain. She? She? Was it possible that they
were talking about her? He sat there debating this question for ten
minutes, when he was aware that he himself had become an object of
intense interest to the three. The two ladies were, in fact, staring
rather hard. The stare of the younger was so wide that it merely
included him as an unregarded detail in the panorama of sea and sky;
but the stare of the elder, a stout lady in a florid gown, was
concentrated, almost passionate; it came straight at him through a
double eye-glass elevated on a tortoiseshell stem. The clergyman
endeavoured to suggest by his attitude that he took no part in the
staring or the talk; he smiled out to sea with an air of beatific
union with Nature.