"I don't want to be cryptic, and perhaps I ought to explain a little. I meant that you'll see that they're the best things I've written, and that I should not have written them if it had not been for you. I don't know whether you'll forgive me for writing them, but I think you will. Because you'll understand that I had to."

"Have you published any of them?"

It seemed to him that the question was dictated by a sudden fear.

"Rather not. I want to talk to you about that later on, when you've read them."

"When will you want them back?"

"I don't want them back at all. I brought them for you to keep."

"To keep?"

"Yes, if you care for them."

"But this is the original manuscript?" She was most painfully aware of the value of the thing.

He smiled. "Yes, I couldn't give you a copy, because there isn't one."

"What a reckless person you are. I must make a copy, then, and keep that."

"That would spoil my pleasure and my gift, too. It's only valuable because it's unique."

"Whatever it is it's sure to be that."

"I don't mean in that way altogether—" he hesitated, for he had touched a part of his subject which had to be handled gently; and he was aware that in handling it at all he was courting rejection of the gift.

"And you are going to leave it with me now?"

"Yes."

She did not look up, but kept her eyes fixed on the sheets that lay in her lap, her hands lightly covering them. Was it possible that her finger-tips had caught the secret of the page beneath them and that their delicate nerves had already carried it to her brain? Was she considering what she was to do?

"You will see that one page is left blank; I couldn't fill it up till I knew whether you would accept the dedication."

"I?" She looked up. She was no doubt surprised; but he thought he could read something in her look that was deeper and sweeter than surprise.

"If you could, it would give me great pleasure. It's the only acknowledgement I can make for all your kindness."

"Please, please don't talk of my kindness."

"I won't. If it were any other book, it might be merely a question of acknowledgement, but this book belongs to you."

"Are you quite sure—" She was about to question his right to offer it, which was as good as questioning his honour, as good as assuming that—She paused, horrified as she realized what it was that she had almost assumed. Kitty had often told her that she erred through excess of subtlety. It wouldn't have mattered with anybody less subtle than Keith Rickman; but he would see it all. He did.

"Quite sure that I oughtn't to offer it to anybody else? I am quite sure. It was written four years ago, before—before I knew anybody else. It has nothing to do with anybody else, it couldn't have been dedicated to anybody else. If you don't accept it—"

"But I do." Her eagerness was the natural recoil from her hesitation. She was so anxious to atone for that shocking blunder she had made.

"I say, how you do take things on trust."

"Some things."

"But you mustn't. You can't accept the dedication of a book you haven't read. Do you know, now I come to think of it, you've always taken me on trust? Do you remember when first I came to you—it's more than five years ago—you took me on trust then?" (Their talk had a way of running to this refrain of 'Do you remember?') "Do you remember how you said,' I must risk it'?"

"Yes, I remember how I insisted on keeping you, and how very unwilling you were to be kept."

"Do you mind telling me what made you want to keep me? You didn't know me in the least, you know."

"I wanted to keep you because you didn't want to stay. I knew then that I could trust you. But I confess that most people might not have seen it in that way."

"Well, I can't let you take these sonnets on trust. For this time, your principle doesn't apply, you see. You can't say you're accepting this dedication because I don't want to give it to you." Though he laughed he rose and backed towards the door, suddenly anxious to be gone.

"Isn't it enough that I want to accept it?"

He shook his head, still backing, and at the door he paused to speak. "You've accepted nothing—as yet."

"Of course," she said to herself, "it would have been wiser to have read them first. But I can trust him."

But as she was about to read them a knock, a familiar knock at the door interrupted her. "Kitty!"

She laid the manuscript hastily aside, well out of Kitty's roving sight. She had noticed how his hands had trembled as he brought it; she did not notice that her own shook a little in thus putting it away from her.

Kitty Palliser, up in town for a week, had come less on her own account than as an impetuous ambassador from the now frantic Edith. She too was prepared to move heaven and earth, if only she could snatch her Lucy from Tavistock Place. But her anxiety was not wholly on Lucia's account, as presently appeared.

"How can you stand it for a minute?" said she.

"I'm standing it very well indeed."

"But what on earth do you find to do all day long, when," said Kitty severely, "you're not talking to young Rickman?"

"All day long I go out, or lie down and read, or talk to Sophie."

"And in the evenings?"

"In the evenings sometimes I make an old man happy by playing."

"And I expect you're making a young man unhappy by playing, too—a very dangerous game."

"Kitty, that young man is perfectly happy. He's going to be married."

"All the worse. Then you'll make a young woman unhappy as well. This little game would be dangerous enough with a man of your own set. It isn't fair to play it with him, Lucy, when you know the rules and he doesn't."

"I assure you, Kitty, he knows them as well as you or I do; better."

"I doubt it." Kitty's eyes roamed round the room (they had not lost their alert and hungry look) and they took in the situation at a glance. That move in the game would never have been made if he had known the rules. How could she let him make it?

"Really, Lucy, for a nice woman you do the queerest things."

"And, really, Kitty, for a clever woman, you say the stupidest. You're getting like Edith."

"I am not like Edith. I only say stupid things. She thinks them. What's more, in thinking them she only thinks of herself and her precious family. I'm thinking of you, dear, and"—Kitty's voice grew soft—"and of him. You ought to think of him a little too."

"I do think of him. I've been thinking of him all the time."

"I know you have. But don't let him suffer because of the insanely beautiful way you have of thinking."

There was a pause, in which it was evident to Kitty that Lucia was thinking deeply, and beautifully too.

"Have I made him suffer? I'm afraid I did once. He was valuable, and I damaged him."

"Yes; and ever since you've been trying to put him together again; in your own way, not his. That's fatal."

Lucia shook her head and followed her own train of thought. "Kitty, to be perfectly honest, I think—I'm not sure, but I think—from something he said to-day that you were right about him once. I mean about his beginning to care too much. I'm afraid it was so, at Harmouth, towards the end. But it isn't so any more. He tried to tell me just now. He did it beautifully; as if he knew that that would make me happier. At least I think that's what he meant. He didn't say much, but I'm sure he was thinking about his marriage."

"Heaven help his wife then—if he got as far as that. I suppose you take a beautiful view of her, too? Drop it, for goodness' sake, drop it."

"Not I. It would mean dropping him. It's all right, Kitty. You don't know the ways of poets."

"Perhaps not. But I know the ways of men."

Though Kitty had not accomplished her mission she so far prevailed that she carried her Lucy off to dinner.

It was somewhere towards midnight, when all the house was quiet, that Lucia first looked into Keith Rickman's sonnets. She had been led to expect something in the nature of a personal revelation, and the first sonnet struck the key-note, gave her the clue.

I asked the minist'ring priests who never tire In love's high service, who behold their bliss Through golden gloom of Love's dread mysteries, What heaven there be for earth's foregone desire?

And they kept silence. But the gentle choir Who sing Love's praises answered me, "There is No voice to speak of these deep sanctities, For Love hath sealed his servants' lips with fire."

Yet in his faithfulness put thou thy faith, Though he hath bound thee in the house of pain, And given thy body to the scourging years, And brought thee for thy thirst the drink of tears, That sorrowing thou shouldst serve him unto death; For when Love reigneth, all his saints shall reign.

She kindled and flamed, her whole being one inspired and burning sympathy. She knew what it was all about. She was on the track of a Poet's Progress in quest of the beloved Perfection, Beauty and Truth in one. Of those nine and twenty sonnets she looked for a score that should make immortal the moments of triumph and of vision, the moments of rapture and fulfilment of the heart's desire. Her glance fell now on two lines that clearly pointed to the goal of those who travel on the divine way—

—Elysian calm and passion with no stain Of mortal tears, no touch of mortal pain—

She hoped he had reached it. And more than that she hoped. She was ignorant of what his life had been before he knew her; but the Song of Confession had made her realize that besides this way where the poet went invincibly there was another where the man desired to go, where, as they were so ready to tell her, he had not always gone. But that was before she knew him. She hoped (taking her beautiful view) that in this gift of his he had meant to give to her who understood him some hint or sign that he had come near it also, the way of Righteousness. She looked to find many sonnets dealing with these secret matters of the soul. Therefore she approached them fearlessly, since she knew what they were all about. And since, in that curious humility of the man that went so oddly with the poet's pride, he had so exaggerated his obligation, taking, as he said, the will for the deed and making of her desire to serve him a service actually done; since his imagination had played round her for a moment as it played round all things, transforming, magnifying, glorifying, she might perhaps find one sonnet of dedication to her who had understood him.

But when she had read them all, she saw, and could not help seeing, that the whole nine and twenty were one continuous dedication—and to her. If she had found what she looked for, she found also that a revelation had been made to her of things even more sacred, more personal; a revelation that was in its way unique. He had hidden nothing, kept back nothing, not one moment of that three-weeks' passion (for so she dated it). It was all laid before her as it had been; all its immortal splendour, and all its mortal suffering and its shame. Not a line (if she could have stayed to think of that), not a word that could offend her taste or hurt her pride. The thing was perfect. She understood why it had been shown to her. She understood that he wanted to tell her that he had loved her. She understood that he never would have told her if it had not been all over. It was because it was all over that he had brought her this, to show her how great a thing she had done for him, she who thought she had done nothing. As she locked the sonnets away in a safe place for the night, in her heart there was a great pride and a still greater thankfulness and joy. Joy because it was all over, pride because it had once been, and thankfulness because it had been given her to know.

And in his room behind the wall that separated them the poet walked up and down, tortured by suspense; and said to himself over and over again, "I wonder how she'll take it."



CHAPTER LX

That was on a Thursday. It had been arranged earlier in the week that Flossie and he were to dine with Lucia on Friday evening. On Saturday and Sunday the Beaver would be let loose, and would claim him for her own. He could not hope to see Lucia alone before Monday evening; his suspense, then, would have to endure for the better part of four days. He had nothing to hope for from Friday evening. Lucia's manner was too perfect to afford any clue as to how she had taken it. If she were offended she would hardly let him see it before Flossie and Miss Roots. If she accepted, there again the occasion forbade her to give any sign to one of her guests that should exclude the other two. Still, it was just possible that he might gather something from her silence.

But as it happened, he had not even that to go upon. Never had Lucia been less silent than on Friday night. Not that she talked more than usual, but that all her looks, all her gestures spoke. They spoke of her pleasure in the happiness of her friend; of tenderness to the little woman whom he loved (so little and he so great); of love that embraced them both, the great and the little, a large, understanding love that was light and warmth in one. For Lucia believed firmly that she understood. She had always desired him to be happy, to be reconciled to the beautiful and glorious world; she had tried to bring about that reconciliation; and she conceived herself to have failed. And now because the thing had been done so beautifully, so perfectly (if a little unexpectedly), by somebody else, because she was relieved of all anxiety and responsibility, Lucia was rejoicing with all her heart.

He had not been five minutes in the room before he saw it all. Lucia believed that it was all over, and was letting herself go, carried away by the spectacle of a supreme and triumphal happiness. She triumphed too. Her eyes when they looked at him seemed to be saying, "Didn't I tell you so?"

He saw why they had been asked to dinner. The spirit of the bridal hour was upon her, and she had made a little feast to celebrate it. Like everything she did, it was simple and beautiful and exquisite of its kind. And yet it was not with that immaculate white linen cloth, spread on Keith's writing-table, strewn with slender green foliage and set out with delicate food and fruit and wine, nor with those white flowers, nor with those six shaded candles, that she had worked the joyous tender charm. These things, in her hands and in his eyes, became sacramental, symbolic of Lucia's soul with its pure thoughts and beautiful beliefs, its inspired and burning charities.

And the hero of this feast of happiness sat at her right hand, facing his little bride-elect, a miserable man consumed with anguish and remorse. He had never had so painful a sense of the pathos of his Beaver. For if anybody was happy it was she. Flossie was aware that it was her hour, and that high honour was being paid to her. Moreover, he could see for the moment that the worm had ceased to gnaw, and that she had become the almost affectionate thrall of the lady whose motto was Invictus. She had been forced (poor little girl) to anticipate her trousseau in order to attire herself fitly for the occasion, and was looking remarkably pretty in her way. She sat very upright, and all her demeanour was irreproachably modest, quiet and demure. Nothing could have been more correct than her smile, frequent, but so diminutive that it just lifted her upper lip and no more. No insight, no foreboding troubled her. Her face, soft and golden white in the candlelight, expressed a shy and delicate content. For Flossie was a little materialist through and through. Her smooth and over feminine body seemed to have grown smoother and more feminine still under the touch of pleasure; all that was hard and immobile in her melting in the sense of well-being.

It was not merely that Flossie was on her good behaviour. His imagination (in league with his conscience) suggested that the poor child, divinely protected by the righteousness of her cause, was inspired to confound his judgement of her, to give no vantage ground to his disloyalty, to throw him defenceless on his own remorse. Or was it Lucia who inspired her? Lucia, whose loving spirit could create the thing it loved, whose sweetness was of so fine and piercing a quality that what it touched it penetrated. He could not tell, but he thanked Heaven that at least for this hour which was hers the little thing was happy. He, for his part, by unprecedented acts of subterfuge and hypocrisy, endeavoured to conceal his agony.

Miss Roots alone divined it. Beyond looking festive in a black silk gown and a kind of white satin waistcoat, that clever lady took a strained and awkward part in the rejoicing. He was inclined to think that the waistcoat committed her to severity, until he became aware that she was watching him with a furtive sympathy in the clever eyes that saw through his pitiful play. How was it that Lucia, she who once understood him, could not divine him too?

From this estranging mood he was roused by the innocent laughter of the Beaver. He was aware of certain thin and melancholy sounds that floated up from some room below. They struggled with the noises of the street, overcame, and rose strident and triumphant to invade the feast. They seemed to him in perfect keeping with the misery and insanity of the hour.

It was Mr. Partridge playing on his flute.

Miss Roots looked at Lucia. "That's you, Lucy. You've been talking to him about that flute. I suppose you told him you would love to hear him play it?"

"No, Sophie, I didn't tell him that." But Lucy looked a little guilty. The flute rose as if in passionate protest against her denial. It seemed to say "You did! You know you did!"

"I only said it was a pity he'd given it up, and I meant it. But oh!" and Lucy put her hands up to her ears, "I don't mean it any more."

"That comes," said Rickman, "of taking things on trust."

She smiled and shook her head. It was her first approach to a sign of reassurance.

"That's the sort of thing she's always doing. It doesn't matter for you, Lucy. You won't have to stay on and hear him."

"I don't know. I think I shall stay on. You see, Mr. Rickman, I can't part with this pretty room."

"Do you like it?"

"I like it very much indeed. You're all coming to dine with me here again some day."

"And you must come and dine with us, Miss Harden, when we've got settled." It was Flossie who spoke.

"I shall be delighted."

He looked up, surprised. He could not have believed the Beaver could have done it so prettily. He had not even realized that it could be done at all. It never occurred to him that his marriage could bring him nearer to Lucia Harden. He looked kindly at the Beaver and blessed her for that thought. And then a thought bolder than the Beaver's came to him. "I hope," he said, "you'll do more than that. You must come and stay with us in the summer. You shall sit out in a deck-chair in the garden all day. That's the way to get strong."

Then he remembered that she could do that just as well in someone else's garden up at Hampstead, and he looked shy and anxious as he added, "Will you come?"

"Of course I'll come," said she.

He saw her going through the house at Ealing and sitting in the little green garden with the lilac bushes about her all in flower. And at the thought of her coming he was profoundly moved. His eyes moistened, and under the table his knees shook violently with the agitation of his nerves. Miss Roots gave one queer little glance at him and another at Flossie, and the moment passed.

And Lucia had not divined it. No, not for a moment, not even in the moment of leave-taking. She was still holding Flossie's hand in hers when her eyes met his, kind eyes that were still saying almost triumphantly, "I told you so."

As she dropped Flossie's hand for his, she answered the question that he had not dared to ask. "I've read them," she said, and there was no diminution in her glad look.

"When may I see you?"

"To-morrow, can you? Any time after four?"



CHAPTER LXI

He came into Lucia's presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself. And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.

Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-classic drama. Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day. Between Helen in Leuce and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul.

"Well," he said, glancing at the poems, as he seated himself. "What do you think of them? Am I forgiven? Do you consent?"

"So many questions? They're all answered, aren't they, if I say I consent?"

"And do you?" There was acute anxiety in his voice and eyes. It struck her as painful that the man, whom she was beginning to look on as possibly the greatest poet of his age, should think it necessary to plead to her for such a little thing.

"I do indeed."

"Without reservations?"

"What reservations should there be? Of course I could only be glad—and proud—that you should do me so much honour. If I can't say very much about it, don't think I don't feel it. I feel it more than I can say."

"Do you really mean it? I was afraid that it might offend you; or that you'd think I oughtn't to have written the things; or at any rate that I'd no business to show them to you. And as for the dedication, I couldn't tell how you'd feel about that."

And she, having before her eyes the greatness of his genius, was troubled by the humility and hesitation of his approach. It recalled to her the ways of his pathetic youth, his youth that obscurity made wild and shy and unassured.

"I can't tell either," she replied, "I don't know whether I ought to feel proud or humble about it; but I think I feel both. Your wanting to dedicate anything to me would have been enough to make me very proud. Even if it had been a little thing—but this thing is great. In some ways it seems to me the greatest thing you've done yet. I did think just at first that I ought perhaps to refuse because of that. And then I saw that, really, that was what made it easy for me to accept. It's so great that the dedication doesn't count."

"But it does count. It's the only thing that counts to me. You can't take it like that and separate it from the rest. Those sonnets would still be dedicated to you even if you refused to let me write your name before them. I want you to see that they are the dedication."

Lucia shook her head. She had seen it. She could see nothing else when she read them. How was it that the poet's bodily presence made her inclined to ignore the reference to herself; to take these poems dedicated to her as an event, not in her life or his, but in the history of literature?

"No," she said, "you must not look at them that way. If they were, it might be a reason for refusing. I know most people would think they'd less right to accept what wasn't really dedicated to them. But, you see, it's just because it isn't really dedicated to me that I can accept it."

"But it is—"

"No, not to me. You wouldn't be so great a poet if it were. I don't see myself here; but I see you, and your idea of me. It's—it's dedicated to that dream of yours. Didn't I tell you your dream was divorced from reality?"

"You told me it would be reconciled to it."

"And it is, isn't it? And the reality is worth all the dreams that ever were?"

He could have told her that so it appeared to those who are bound in the house of bondage; but that in Leuce, the country of deliverance, the dream and the reality are indivisible, being both divine. He could have told her that he had known as much five years ago; even before he knew her.

"After all," he said, "that's admitting that they are divided. And that, if you remember, was what I said, not what you said."

Lucia evaded the issue in a fashion truly feminine. "It doesn't matter a bit what either of us said then, so long as you know now."

"There's one thing I don't know. I don't know how you really take it; or whether you will really understand. Just now I thought you did, But after all it seems you don't. You think I'm only trying to pay you a stupid literary compliment. You think when I wrote those things I didn't mean them; my imagination was simply taking a rather more eccentric flight than usual. Isn't that so?"

"I'm certainly allowing for your imagination. I can't forget that you are a poet. You won't let me forget it. I can't separate your genius from the rest of you."

"And I can't separate the rest of me from it. That makes the difference, you see." He was angry as he said that. He had wondered whether she would deal as tenderly with his passion as she had dealt with his dream; and she had dealt just as tenderly. But it was because she identified the passion with the dream. He had not been prepared for that view of it; and somehow it annoyed him. But for that, he would never have spoken as he now did. "When I wondered how you would take it I thought it might possibly strike you as something rather too real, almost offensively so. Do you know, I'd rather you'd taken it that way than that you should talk about my dreams. My dreams." (It was shocking, the violent emphasis of disgust the poet, the dreamer, flung into that one word.) "As if I'd dreamed that I knew you. As if I'd dreamed that I cared for you. Would you rather think I dreamed it? You can if you like. Or would you rather think it was the most real thing that ever happened to me? So real that after it happened—because it happened—I left off being the sort of man and the sort of poet I was, and became another sort. So real and so strong that it saved me from one or two other things, uncommonly strong and real, that had got a pretty tight hold of me, too. Would you rather think that you'd really done this for me, or that I'd dreamed it all?"

She looked at his face, the unforgotten, unforgetable face, which when she first knew it had kindled and darkened so swiftly and inexplicably. She knew it now. She held the key of all its mysteries. It was the face that had turned to her five years ago with just that look; in the mouth and lifted chin that imperious impetuous determination to make her see; in the eyes that pathetic trust in her seeing. The same face; and yet it would have told her, if he had not, that he was another man. No, not another man; but of all the ways that were then open to him to take he had chosen the noblest. And so, of all the expressions that in its youth had played on that singularly expressive face, it was the finest only that had become dominant. That face had never lied to her. Why should he not plead for the sincerity of his passion, since it was all over now? Was it possible that there was some secret insincerity in her? How was it that she had made him think that she desired to ignore, to repudiate her part in him? That she preferred a meaningless compliment to the confession which was the highest honour that could be paid to any woman? Was it because the honour was so great that she was afraid to take it?

"Of course I would rather think it was really so."

"Then you must believe that I really cared for you; and that it is only because I cared that it is really so."

"I do believe it. But I can't take it all to myself. Another person might have cared just as much, and it might have done him harm—I would never have forgiven myself if I had done you harm—I want you to see that it wasn't anything in me; it was something in you that made the difference."

He smiled sadly. "You know it does sound as if you wanted to keep out of it."

"Does it? If I had really been in it, do you think that I wouldn't be glad and thankful? I am, even for the little that I have done. Even though I know another woman might have done as much, or more, I'm glad I was the one. But, you see, I didn't know I was in it at all. I didn't know the sort of help you wanted. Perhaps, if I had known, I couldn't have helped you. But my knowing or not knowing doesn't matter one bit. If I did help you—that way—I helped some one else too. At least I should like to think I did. I should like to think that one reason why you care for your wife so much is because you cared a little for me. There is that way of looking at it." Then, lest she should seem to be seeking some extraneous justification of a fact that in her heart she abhorred, she added, "Every way I look at it I'm glad. I'm glad that you cared. I'm glad because it's been, and glad because it's over. For if it hadn't been over—"

"What were you going to say?"

"I was going to say that if it hadn't been over you couldn't have given me these. I didn't say it; because it would have sounded as if that were all I cared about. As if I wouldn't have been almost as glad if you'd never written a line of them. Only in that case I should never have known."

"No. You would never have known."

"I think I should have been glad, even if the poems had been—not very good poems."

"You wouldn't have known in that case either. I wouldn't have shown them to you if they had not been good. As it is, when I wrote them I never meant to show them to you."

"Oh, but I think—"

"Of course you do. But I wasn't going to print them before you'd seen them. Do you know what I'd meant to do with them—what in fact I did do with them? I left them to you in my will with directions that they weren't to be published without your consent. It seems a rather unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time they might be valuable. I don't know whether they would have sold for three thousand pounds—I admit it was a draft on posterity that posterity might have dishonoured—but I thought they might possibly go a little way towards paying my debt."

"Your debt? I don't understand." But the trembling of her mouth belied its words.

"Don't you? Don't you remember?"

"No, I don't. I never have remembered."

"Probably not. But you can hardly suppose that I've forgotten it."

"What has it to do with you, or me—or this?"

"Not much, perhaps; but still something, you'll admit."

"I admit nothing. I can't bear your ever having thought of it. I wish you hadn't told me. It spoils everything."

"Does it? Such a little thing? Surely a friend might be allowed to leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead? And it wasn't his fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?"

The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.

"But you see I didn't leave it. I didn't wait for that. I was afraid that my being dead would put you in a more embarrassing position than if I'd been alive. You might have hated those poems and yet you might have shrunk from suppressing them for fear of wounding the immortal vanity of a blessed spirit. Or you might have taken that horrid literary view I implored you not to take. You might have hesitated to inflict so great a loss on the literature of your country." He tried to speak lightly, as if it were merely a whimsical and extravagant notion that he should be reckoned among the poets. And yet in his heart he knew that it must be so. "But now the things can't be published unless you will accept them as they were originally meant. There's nothing gross about the transaction; nothing that need offend either you or me."

"I can't—I can't—"

"Well," he said gently, fearing the appearance of grossness in pressing the question, "we can settle that afterwards, can't we? Meanwhile at all events the publication rests with you."

"The publication has nothing whatever to do with me—The dedication, perhaps."

"You've accepted that. Still, you might object to your name appearing before the public with mine."

Lucia looked bewildered. She thought she had followed him in all his subtleties; but she had had difficulty in realizing that he was actually proposing to suppress his poems in deference to her scruples, if she had any. Some shadowy notion of his meaning was penetrating her now.

"My name," she said, "will mean nothing to the public."

"Then you consent?"

"Of course. It's absurd to talk about my consent. Besides, why should I mind now—when it is all over?"

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was by an effort, as if he unwillingly obeyed some superior constraint. "If it hadn't been all over would you have minded then? Would you have refused your consent?"

"To your publishing your own poems? How could I?"

"To the dedication, I mean. If it hadn't been all over, would you have given your consent to that?"

His anxiety had deepened to an agony which seemed to have made his face grow sharp and thin almost as she looked at him. She judged that this question was vital, and that the truth was required of her.

"No, not to that. You see, it's only because it's all over that I've consented now."

"I see; that's the condition? You would never have consented but for that."

"Why should we talk about that now?"

"I wanted to know the truth."

"Why should you? It's a truth that has nothing to do with things as they are, only with things as they might have been. Isn't it enough to be glad that they weren't, that it is all over, and that this is the end of it?"

Even as she said the words it struck her that there was something ominous in this reiteration.

"But it isn't all over. This isn't the end of it."

His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the intense vibration of the tones. There was a pause in which they seemed still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the passionate pulse of sound.

"I didn't mean to tell you. I know you'd rather think it wasn't so. And I would have let you think it if it hadn't been for what you told me—what I made you tell me."

"I don't understand. What did I tell you?"

"You told me the truth." He spoke with a sudden savage energy. "How could I go on lying after that?"

She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes there was pain and a vague terror.

"I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it. But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one condition, and I know that I can't possibly fulfil the condition, what am I to do? Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for doing if you knew?"

Till now she had left the manuscript lying in her lap, where unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch. But as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an irresistible impulse of rejection. He knew that he was answered.

"If I had," he said, "in one sense I should have done you no wrong. All this would be nothing to the world which would read these poems. But when I knew that it made all the difference to you—"

She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, in reproach that was almost anger.

"To me? Do you suppose I'm thinking of myself?"

"Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known. What was I to do?"

She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.

"It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing."

He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.

"If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked."

"I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?"

"That is not what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me."

"For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth."

"But it isn't the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it is."

"And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?"

She did not answer. She only looked at him, as if by looking she could read the truth. For his face had never lied.

He persisted. "If it were true, what would you think of me?"

"I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so. But it isn't true."

He smiled. "Therefore it can't be dishonourable of me to say so."

"No, not that. You are not dishonourable; therefore it can't be true. Let us forget that you ever said it."

"But I can't forget that it's true any more than I can make it untrue. You think me dishonourable, because you think I've changed. But I haven't changed. It always was so, ever since I knew you; and that's more than five years ago now. I am dishonourable; but that's not where the dishonour comes in. The dishonourable thing would have been to have left off caring for you. But I never did leave off. There never was a minute when it wasn't true, nor a minute when I didn't think it. If I was sure of nothing else I was always sure of that. Where the dishonour came in was in caring for another woman, in another way."

"The dishonour would come in if you'd left off caring for her. And you haven't done that. It would come in a little now, I think, if you said that you didn't care. But you don't say it; you don't even think it. Shall I tell you the truth? You've let your genius get too strong a hold over you. You've let it get hold, too, of this feeling that you had for me. And now, though you know perfectly well—as well as I do—that it's all over, your genius is trying to persuade you that the feeling is still there when it isn't."

"That is not so, but you can say it is, if it makes you any happier."

"It does make me happier to think that it's your genius, not you, that says these things. For I can forgive your genius; but I couldn't have forgiven you."

At that moment he felt a savage jealousy of his genius, because she loved it. "And yet, you said a little while ago you couldn't separate the two."

"You have obliged me to separate them, to find an excuse for you. This ought not to have happened; but it could not have happened to a man who was not a poet."

All the time she was miserably aware that she was trying to defend herself with subtleties against the impact of a terrible reality. And because that reality must weigh more heavily on him than her, she was trying to defend him too, against himself, to force on him, against himself, her own subtilizing, justifying view.

But his subtlety was a match for hers. "Your cousin once did me the honour to say I was one-seventh part a poet, and upon my honour I prefer his estimate to yours."

"What is mine?"

"That I'm nothing but a poet. That there wasn't enough of me left over to make a man."

"That is not my estimate, and you know it. I think you so much a man that your heart will keep you right, even though your genius has led you very far astray."

"Is that all you know about it?"

"Well, I'm not sure that it is your genius, this time. I rather think it's your sense of honour. I believe you think that because you once cared for me you've got to go on caring, lest I should accuse you of being faithless to your dream." ("Surely," she said to herself, "I've made it easy for him now?")

But the word was too much for him. "For Goodness' sake don't talk to me any more about my dream. You may think any mortal thing you like about me, so long as you don't do that."

She smiled faintly, as if with an effort at forbearance. "Very well then, I won't talk about your dream. I'll say you were afraid lest I should think you had been faithless to me. It would never have occurred to you if you hadn't seen me again. It will not occur to you after I am gone. It will be all over by to-morrow."

"Why to-morrow?" He spoke stupidly. Fear had made him stupid. "Why to-morrow?"

"Because I am going to-morrow."

Then he knew that it was indeed all over. The door which had been open to him was about to close; and once closed it would never be open to him again.

"What must you think of me—"

"I think you have done very wrong, and that our talking about it only makes it worse. And so—I'm sorry—but I must ask you to leave me."

But he did not leave her. "And I must ask you to forgive me," he said gently.

"I? I have nothing to forgive. You haven't done anything to me. But I should never forgive you if I thought this foolishness could make one moment's difference to—to Flossie."

"It never has made any difference to her," he replied coldly, "or to my feeling for her. I never felt towards any woman as I feel towards you. It isn't the same thing at all. Heaven knows I thought I cared enough for her to marry her. But it seems I didn't. That's why I say it makes no difference to her. Nothing is altered by it. As far as Flossie is concerned, whether I marry her or not I shall have behaved abominably. I don't know which is the more dishonourable."

"Don't you?"

"No. I only know which I'm going to do."

She turned her head away. And that turning away was intolerable. It was the closing of the door.

"Is it so very terrible to you?" he said gently.

He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour—Lucia's honour.

"To me? I'm not thinking of myself—not of myself at all. How could I think of myself? I'm thinking of her." She turned to him and let her tears gather in her eyes unheeded. "Don't you see what you've done?"

Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done. He had taken the friendship she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands. All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion. He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour. And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise. The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing. Supposing he had suppressed both his passion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then? Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?

"Don't you see what you have done?" she said. "You've made me wish I had never come here and that I'd never seen you again. It was only the other night—the dear little girl—she came up here and sat with me, and we had a talk. We talked about you. She told me how she came to know you, and how good you'd been to her and how long it was before either of you knew. She told me things about herself. She is very shy—very reserved—but she let me see how much she cares—and how much you care. Think what you must be to her. She has no father and no mother, she has nobody but you. She told me that. And then—she took me up to her room and showed me all her pretty things. She was so happy—and how can I look at her again? She would hate me if she knew; and I couldn't blame her, poor child. She could never understand that it was not my fault."

But as she said it her conscience rose in contradiction and told her that it was her fault. Her fault in the very beginning for drawing him into an intimacy that his youth and inexperience made dangerous. Her fault for sacrificing, yes, sacrificing him to that impulse to give pleasure which had only meant giving pleasure to herself at his expense. Her fault for endlessly refining on the facts of life, till she lost all feeling of its simpler and more obvious issues. Kitty had been right when she told her that she treated men as if they were disembodied spirits. She had trusted too much to her own subtlety. That was how all her blunders, had been made. If she had been cold as well as subtle—but Lucia was capable of passionate indiscreet things to be followed by torments of her pride. Her pride had only made matters worse. It was her pride, in the beginning, that had blinded her. When she had told Kitty that she was not the sort of woman to let this sort of thing happen with this sort of man, she had summed up her abiding attitude to one particular possibility. She had trusted to the social gulf to keep her safe, apart. Afterwards, she knew that she had not trusted so much to the social gulf. She had not been quite so proud; neither, since Kitty had opened her eyes, had she been so blind; but she had been ten times more foolish. Her mind had refused to dwell upon Kitty's dreadful suggestions, because they were dreadful. Unconscious of her sex, she had remained unconscious of her power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman for protection. Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the passionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was left subtler and more pure. She had thought she could really deal with him now as a disembodied spirit. And so under the shelter of his engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.

These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.

She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me so unhappy?"

"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"

She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately denied.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."

He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat. She called him back, as she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of delivering a final stab. Only that this time she knew it was a stab; and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.

But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the manuscript, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.

"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them—or—or have anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if I'd taken what belonged to some one else."

As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.

But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood. "And yet," he murmured, "you say it isn't true."

She did not contradict him this time. And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.



BOOK IV

THE MAN HIMSELF



CHAPTER LXII

After all, the wedding did not take place on the twenty-fifth; for on the twentieth Keith was summoned to Ilford by a letter from his stepmother. Mrs. Rickman said she thought he ought to know (as if Keith were seeking to avoid the knowledge!) that his father had had a slight paralytic seizure. He had recovered, but it had left him very unsettled and depressed. He kept on for ever worrying to see Keith. Mrs. Rickman hoped (not without a touch of asperity) that Keith would lose no time in coming, as his father seemed so uneasy in his mind.

Very uneasy in his mind was Isaac, as upstairs in the big front bedroom, (which from its excess of glass and mahogany bore a curious resemblance to the front shop,) he lay, a strangely shrunken figure in the great bed. His face, once so reticent and regular, was drawn on one side, twisted into an oblique expression of abandonment and agony.

Keith was not prepared for the change; and he broke down completely as the poor right hand (which Isaac would use) opened and closed in a vain effort to clasp his. But Isaac was intolerant of sympathy, and at once rebuked all reference to his illness. Above the wreck of his austere face, his eyes, blood-shot as they were and hooded under their slack lids, defied you to notice any change in him.

"I sent for you," he said, "because I wanted to talk over a little business." His utterance was thick and uncertain; the act of speech showed the swollen tongue struggling in the distorted mouth.

"Oh, don't bother about business now, father," said Keith, trying hard to steady his voice.

His father gave an irritable glance, as if he were repelling an accusation of mortality, conveyed in the word "now."

"And why not now as well as any other time?"

Keith blew his nose hard and turned away.

"What's the matter with you? Do you suppose I'm ill?"

"Oh no, of course not."

"No. I'm just lying here to rest and get up my strength again; God willing. But in case anything should happen to me, Keith, I want you to be clear as to how you stand."

"Oh, that's all right," said Keith cheerfully.

"It's not all right. It's not as I meant it to be. Between you and me, my big house hasn't come to much. I think if you'd stayed in it—well—we won't say any more about that. But Paternoster Row—now—that's sound. Mrs. Rickman always 'ad a fancy for the City 'ouse, and she's put money into it. You'll have your share that was settled on you when I married your poor mother. You stick to the City 'ouse, Keith, and it'll bring you in something some day. And the Name'll still go on." It was pathetic, his persistent clinging to the immortality of his name. Pathetic, too, his inability to see it otherwise than as blazoned for ever and ever over a shop-front. His son's fame (if he ever achieved it) was a mere subsidiary glory. "But Pilkington'll get the Strand 'ouse. Whatever I do I can't save it. I don't mind owning now, the Strand 'ouse was a mistake."

"A very great mistake."

"And Pilkington'll get the 'Arden library."

"You don't know. You may get rid of him—before that time."

Isaac seemed to be torn by his thoughts the more because they found no expression in his face that was bound, mouth, eye, and eyelid in its own agony. Before what time? Before the day of his death, or the day of redemption? "The mortgage," he said, "'as still three years to run. But I can't raise the money."

Keith was silent. He hardly liked to ask, though he would have given a great deal to know, the amount of the sum his father could not raise. A possibility, a splendid, undreamed of possibility, had risen up before him; but he turned away from it; it was infamous to entertain it, for it depended on his father's death. And yet for the life of him he could not help wondering whether the share which would ultimately come to him would by any chance cover that mortgage. To be any good it would have to come before the three years were up, though—He put the splendid horrible thought aside. He could not contemplate it. The wish was certainly not the father of that thought. But supposing the thought became the father of a wish?

"That reminds me," said Isaac, "that there was something else I 'ad to say to you."

He did not say it all at once. At the very thought of it his swollen tongue moved impotently without words. At last he got it out.

"I've been thinking it over—that affair of the library. And I've been led to see that what I did was wrong. Wrong, I mean, in the sight of God."

There was a sense he could not get rid of, in which it might still be considered superlatively right.

"And wot you did—"

"Oh, never mind what I did. That's all right."

"You did the righteous and the Christian thing."

"Did I? I'm sure I don't know why I did it."

"Ah—if you'd done it for the love of God, there's no doubt it'd 'ave been more pleasing to 'im."

"Well, you know I didn't do it for the love—of God."

"You did it for the love of woman? I was right then, after all."

Isaac felt inexpressibly consoled by Keith's cheerful disclaimer of all credit. His manner did away with the solemnity of the occasion; but it certainly smoothed for him the painful path of confession.

"Well, yes. If it hadn't been for Miss Harden I don't suppose I should have done it at all."

He said it very simply; but not all the magnificent consolations of religion could have given Isaac greater peace. It was a little more even, the balance of righteousness between him and Keith. He had never sinned, as Keith had done, after the flesh. Of the deeds done in the body he would have but a very small account to render at the last.

"And you see, you haven't got anything for it out of her."

There was a certain satisfaction in his tone. He saw a mark of the divine displeasure in Keith's failure to marry the woman he desired.

"And if I could only raise that money—"

He meant it—he meant it. The balance, held in God's hands, hung steady now.

"How much is it?" asked Keith; for he thought, "Perhaps he's only holding on to that share for my sake; and if he knew that I would give it up now, he might really—"

"Four thousand nine with th' interest," said Isaac.

"Do you think, Keith, it would have sold for five?"

"Well, yes, I think it very possibly might."

"Ah!" Isaac turned his face from his son. The sigh expressed a profound, an infinite repentance.



CHAPTER LXIII

On the twenty-fifth Isaac Rickman lay dead in his villa at Ilford. Two days after Keith's visit he had been seized by a second and more terrible paralytic stroke; and from it he did not recover. The wedding was now indefinitely postponed till such time as Keith could have succeeded in winding up his father's affairs.

They proved rather less involved than he had expected. Isaac had escaped dying insolvent. Though a heavy mortgage delivered Rickman's in the Strand into Pilkington's possession, the City house was not only sound, as Isaac had said, but in a fairly flourishing condition. Some blind but wholly salutary instinct had made him hold on to that humbler and obscurer shop where first his fortunes had been made; and with its immense patronage among the Nonconformist population Rickman's in the City held a high and honourable position in the trade. The bulk of the profits had to go to the bookseller's widow as chief owner of the capital; still, the slender partnership settled on his son, if preserved intact and carefully manipulated, would yield in time a very comfortable addition to Keith's income. If Isaac had lived, his affairs (as far as he was concerned) would have been easily settled. But for his son and heir they proved most seriously complicated.

For Keith was heir, not only to his father's estate, but to that very considerable debt of honour which Isaac had left unpaid. It seemed as if the Harden library, the symbol of a superb intellectual vanity, was doomed to be in eternal necessity of redemption. Until yesterday it had not occurred to Keith that it could be his destiny to redeem it. Yesterday he had refused to let his mind dally with that possibility; to-day it had become the most fitting subject of his contemplation.

The thing was more easily conceived than done. His literary income amounted, all told, to about three hundred and fifty a year, but its sources were not absolutely secure. Metropolis or The Planet might conceivably at any moment cease to be. And there was his marriage. It was put off; but only for a matter of weeks. He had only a hundred and fifty pounds in ready money; the rest had been swallowed up by the little house at Ealing. It was impossible to redeem the Harden library unless he parted with his patrimony; which was, after all, his only safe and imperishable source of income. Still, he had not the smallest hesitation on this head. Neither he nor Flossie had taken it into their calculations when they agreed to marry, and he was not going to consider it now.

The first step proved simple. Mrs. Rickman had no objection to buying him out. On the contrary, she was thankful to get rid of a most reckless and uncomfortable partner. But in the present state of the trade it was impossible to estimate his share at more than four thousand. That covered the principal; but Isaac had paid no interest for more than two years; and that interest Keith would have to pay. Though the four thousand was secure, and Pilkington had given him three years to raise the seven hundred and fifty in, it was not so easily done on an income of three hundred and fifty. Not easy in three years; and impossible in any number of years if he married. Possible only, yes, just possible, if his marriage were postponed until such time as he could have collected the money. Some brilliant stroke of luck might unexpectedly reduce the term; but three years must be allowed. Metropolis and The Planet were surely good for another three years. The other alternative, that of repudiating the obligation, never entered his head for an instant. He could not have touched a shilling of his father's money till this debt was cleared.

There could be no doubt as to what honour demanded of him. But how would Flossie take it? The worst of it was that he was bound (in honour again) to give her the option of breaking off their engagement, if she didn't care to wait. And after all that had passed between them it might not be so easy to persuade her that he was not glad of the excuse; for he himself was so lacking in conviction. Still she was very intelligent; and she would see that it wasn't his fault if their marriage had to be put off. The situation was inevitable and impersonal, and as such it was bound to be hard on somebody. He admitted that it was particularly hard on Flossie. It would have been harder still if Flossie had been out of work; but Flossie, with characteristic prudence, had held on to her post till the very eve of her wedding-day, and had contrived to return to it when she foresaw the necessity for delay. Otherwise he would have had to insist on providing for her until she was independent again; which would have complicated matters really most horribly. It was quite horrible enough to have to explain all this to Flossie. The last time he had explained things (for he had explained them) to Flossie the result had not been exactly happy. But then the things themselves had been very different, and he had had to admit with the utmost contrition that a woman could hardly have had more reasonable grounds for resentment. That was all over and done with now. In that explanation they had explained everything away. They had left no single thread of illusion hanging round the life they were to live together. They accepted themselves and each other as they were. And in the absence of any brighter prospect for either of them there was high wisdom in that acceptance.

If then there was a lack of rapture in his relations with Flossie, there would henceforth at any rate be calm. Her temperament was, he judged, essentially placid, not to say apathetic. There was a soft smoothness about the plump little lady that would be a security against friction. She was not great at understanding; but, taking it all together, she was now in an infinitely better position for understanding him than she had been two weeks ago. Besides, it was after all a simple question of figures; and Flossie's attitude to figures was, unlike his own, singularly uninfluenced by passion. She would take the sensible, practical view.

The sensible practical view was precisely what Flossie did take. But her capabilities of passion he had again misjudged.

He chose his moment with discretion, when time and place and Flossie's mood were most propitious. The time was Sunday evening, the place was the Regent's Park, Flossie's mood was gentle and demure. She had been very nice to him since his father's death, and had shown him many careful small attentions which, with his abiding sense of his own shortcomings towards her, he had found extremely touching. She seemed to him somehow a different woman, not perhaps so pretty as she had been, but nicer. He may have been the dupe of an illusory effect of toilette, for Flossie was in black. She had discussed the propriety of mourning with Miss Bishop, and wore it to-day for the first time with a pretty air of solemnity mingled with satisfaction in her own delicate intimation that she was one with her lover in his grief. She had not yet discovered that black was unbecoming to her, which would have been fatal to the mood.

The flowers were gay in the Broad Walk, Flossie tried to be gay too; and called on him to admire their beauty. They sat down together on a seat in the embrasure of a bed of chrysanthemums. Flossie was interested in everything, in the chrysanthemums, in the weather and in the passers-by—most particularly interested, he noticed, in the family groups. Her black eyes, that glanced so restlessly at the men and so jealously at the women, sank softly on the children, happy and appeased. Poor Flossie. He had long ago divined her heart. He did his best to please her; he sat down when she told him to sit down, stared when she told him to stare, and relapsed into his now habitual attitude of dejection. A little girl toddled past him in play; stopped at his knees and touched them with her hand and rubbed her small body against them, chuckling with delight.

"The dear little mite," said Flossie; "she's taken quite a fancy to you, Keith." Her face was soft and shy under her black veil, and when she looked at him she blushed. He turned his head away. He could not meet that look in Flossie's eyes when he thought of what he had to say to her. He was going to put the joy of life a little farther from her; to delay her woman's tender ineradicable hope.

This was not the moment or the place to do it in. They rose and walked on, turning into the open Park. And there, sitting under a solitary tree by the path that goes towards St. John's Wood, he broke it to her gently.

"Flossie," he said, "I've something to tell you that you mayn't like to hear."

She made no sign of agitation beyond scraping a worn place in the grass with the tips of her little shoes. "Well," she said, with an admirable attempt at patience, "what is it now?"

"You mean you think it's been about enough already?"

"If it's really anything unpleasant, for goodness' sake let's have it out and get it over."

"Right, Flossie. I'm awfully sorry, but I'm afraid we shan't be able to marry for another two years, perhaps three."

"And why not?" Her black eyes darted a vindictive look at him under her soft veil.

"My father's death has made a difference to me."

Her lips tightened, and she drew a sharp but inaudible breath through her nostrils. He had been wrong in supposing that she had not looked for any improvement in his finances after his father's death. On the contrary, knowing of their reconciliation and deceived by the imposing appearance of Rickman's in the Strand, she had counted on a very substantial increase of income.

"Do you mean to say, Keith, he hasn't left you anything?"

He laughed softly—an unpleasant way he had in situations where most people would consider it only decent to keep grave.

"He has left me something. A bad debt."

"What have you got to do with his bad debts? Nobody can come down on you to pay them." She paused. A horrible thought had struck her. "Can they? You don't mean to say they can?"

He shook his head and struggled with his monstrous mirth.

"Keith! What 'ave you done? You surely haven't been backing any bills?"

He laughed outright this time, for the sheer misery of the thing.

"No, oh dear me, no. Not in your sense at least."

"There isn't any other sense. Either you did or you didn't; and I think you might tell me which."

"It's not quite so simple, dear. I didn't back his bills, d'you see, but I backed him.'

"Can they make you responsible? Have they got it down in black and white?"

"Nobody can make me responsible, except myself. It's what they call a debt of honour, Flossie. Those debts are not always down in black and white."

"Why can't you speak plain? I really can't think what you mean by that."

"Can't you? I'll endeavour to explain. A debt of honour, Beaver dear, is a debt that's got to be paid whoever else goes unpaid."

"A fine lot of honour about that," said she.

Was it possible to make the Beaver understand? He, gave her a slight outline of the situation; and he really could not complain of any fault in the Beaver's intelligence. For, by dint of a masterly cross examination, she possessed herself of all the details, even of those which he most desired to keep from her. After their last great explanation there had been more than a tacit agreement between them that the name of Lucia Harden was never to come up again in any future discussion; and that name he would not give. She, however, readily inferred it from his silence.

"You needn't tell me the lady's name," said she.

"I certainly needn't. The name has nothing whatever to do with it.'"

"Oh, hasn't it? You'll not make me believe that you'd 'ave taken it up this way for any one but her."

"Whether I would or wouldn't doesn't affect the point of honour."

"I don't see where it comes in there."

"If you don't I can't make you see it."

"I said I didn't see where it comes in—there. I know what's honourable as well as you, though I daresay my notions wouldn't agree with yours."

"Upon my soul, I shouldn't wonder if they didn't!"

"Look here, Keith. Did you ever make Miss Harden any promise to pay her that money when your father died?"

"Of course I didn't—How could I? Do you suppose she'd have let me do anything of the sort?"

"I don't know what she wouldn't have let you do. Anyhow you didn't make her any promise. Think of the promises and promises you've made to me."

"I do think of them. Have I broken one of them?"

"I don't say you have yet; but you want to."

"I don't wa—I won't break them, I'll keep every one of the blessed lot, if you'll only give me time."

"Give you time? I know what that means. It means that I'm to go back and earn my living. I can slave till I drop for all you care—while you go and throw away all that money on another woman. And I'm to give you time to do it in!"

"I won't ask you to wait for me. I'm perfectly willing to release you from your engagement if you like. It seems only fair to you."

"You care a lot, don't you, about what's fair to me? I believe you'd take the bread out of my mouth to give it to her."

"I would, Flossie, if it was her bread. That money doesn't belong to you or me; it belongs to Miss Harden."

"It seems to me," said Flossie, "that everything belongs to her. I'm sure you've as good as told me so."

"I've certainly given you some right to think so. But that has nothing to do with it; and we agreed that we were going to let it alone, didn't we?"

"It wasn't me that brought it up again, it was you; and it's got everything to do with it. You wouldn't have behaved like this, and you wouldn't be sitting there talking about what's honourable, if it hadn't been for Miss Harden."

"That may very well be. But it doesn't mean what you think it does. It means that before I knew Miss Harden I didn't know or care very much about what's honourable. She taught me to care. I wasn't fit to speak to a decent woman before I knew her. She made me decent."

"Did she sit up half the night with you to do it?".

He made a gesture of miserable impatience.

"You needn't tell me. I can see her."

"You can't. She did it by simply being what she is. If I ever manage to do anything right it will be because of her, as you say. But it doesn't follow that it'll be for her. There's a great difference."

"I don't see it."

"You must try to see it. There's one thing I haven't told you about that confounded money. It was I who let her in for losing it. Isn't that enough to make me keen?"

"You always were keen where she was concerned."

"Look here, Flossie, I thought you were going to give up this sort of thing?"

"So I was when I thought you were going to give her up. It doesn't look like it."

"My dear child, how can I give up what I never had or could have?"

"Well then—are you going to give up your idea?"

"No, I am not. But you can either give me up or wait for me, as I said. But if you marry me, you must marry me and my idea too. You don't like my idea; but that's no reason why you shouldn't like me."

"You're not taking much pains to make me like you."

"I'm taking all the pains I know. But your liking or not liking me won't alter me a little bit. You'll have to take me as I am."

As she looked up at him she realized at last the indomitable nature of the man she had to deal with. And yet he was not unalterable, even on his own showing. She knew some one who had altered him out of all knowledge.

"Come," said she, "don't say you never change."

"I don't say it. You'll have to allow for that possibility, too."

"It seems to me I have to allow for a good many things."

"You have indeed."

"Well, are we going to sit here all night?"

"I'm ready."

They walked back in silence over the straight path that seemed as if it would never end. Flossie stopped half-way in it, stung by an idea.

"There's something you haven't thought of. What are you going to do with the house? And with all that furniture?"

"Let them to somebody. That's all right, Beaver. The house and the furniture can't run away."

"No, but they'll never be the same again."

Nothing would ever be the same again; that was clear. The flowers were still gay in the Broad Walk, and the children, though a little sleepier, were still adorable; but Flossie did not turn to look at them as she passed. Would she ever look at them, at anything, with pleasure again? He had made life very difficult, very cruel to this poor child, whom after all he had promised to protect and care for.

"I say, Beaver dear, it is hard luck on you."

The look and the tone would have softened most women, at least for the time being; but the Beaver remained implacable.

"I'll try to make it easier for you. I'll work like mad. I'll do anything to shorten the time."

"Shorten the time? You don't know how many years you're asking me to wait."

"I'm not asking you to wait. I'm asking you to choose."

"Do you want me to do it now?"

"No, certainly not." She was not indeed in a mood favourable to choice; and he would not influence her decision. It was mean to urge her to an arduous constancy; meaner still to precipitate her refusal. "You must think. You can, you know, when you give your mind to it."

She appeared to be giving her mind to it for the rest of the way home; and her silence left him also free to think it over. After all, what had he done? He had not asked her to wait, but what if he had? Many men have to ask as much of the woman who loves them. Some men have asked even more of the woman whom they love. That was the secret. He could have asked it with a clear conscience if he had but loved her.



CHAPTER LXIV

Flossie was in no hurry about making up her mind. If Keith had asked her to give him time, it was only fair that he should give her time too, and since his mind was made up in any case, time could be no object to him. So days and weeks had passed on and she had conveyed to him no hint of her decision.

On that Sunday evening, in the seclusion of her bedroom, Flossie said to herself that she had made one great mistake. Prudence and foresight were all very well in their way, but this time she had blundered through excess of caution. In sticking to the post that made her independent she had broken her strongest line of defence. If only she had had the courage to relinquish it at the crucial moment, she would have stood a very much better chance in her contest with Keith. She could then have appealed to his pity as she had done with such signal success two years ago, when the result of the appeal had been to bring him violently to the point. She was wise enough to know that in contending with a chivalrous man a woman's strongest defence is her defencelessness. Though she was unable to believe that pure abstract honour was or could be the sole and supreme motive of Keith's behaviour, she felt that if she could have said to him, "I've thrown up a good situation to marry you," his chivalry would not have held out against that argument.

But Flossie never made mistakes. She was too consummate a diplomatist. Therefore, though appearances were against her, it was only reasonable to suppose that she had not really done so now, and that her original inspiration had been right. It was foresight so subtle, so advanced, that it outstripped the ordinary processes of calculation, and appeared afterwards as the mysterious leading of a profounder power, of the under-soul that presses the innocent intellect into the services of its own elemental instincts. The people who yield most obediently to this compulsion are said to have good luck.

Flossie's good luck, however, was not yet apparent either to herself or to her fellow-boarders at Tavistock Place. Not that she had enlarged on her trouble to any of them. The whole thing had been too profoundly humiliating for that. To say nothing of being engaged to a man who had shown so very little impatience to marry her, to have taken and furnished a house and be unable to live in it, to have received congratulations and wedding presents which had all proved premature, to know, and feel that everybody else knew, that her bedroom was at this moment lumbered up with a trousseau which, whether she wore it or put it by two years, would make her equally ridiculous, was really a very trying position for any young lady, and to Flossie, whose nature was most delicately sensitive to such considerations, it was torture. But, after all, these things were material and external; and the worst of Flossie's suffering was in her soul. Before the appearance of Miss Harden, the last two years had passed for Flossie in gorgeous triumphal procession through the boarding-house. She had been the invincible heroine of Mrs. Downey's for two years, she had dragged its young hero at her chariot wheels for two years, she had filled the heart of Ada Bishop with envy and the hearts of Mr. Soper and Mr. Spinks with jealousy and anguish for two years; and now she had all these people pitying her and looking down on her because she had been so queerly treated; and this was even more intolerable to poor Flossie. She knew perfectly well what every one of them was saying. She knew that Ada Bishop had thanked Goodness she wasn't in her shoes; that Miss Bramble spoke of her persistently as "that poor young thing"; that Mrs. Downey didn't know which she pitied most, her or poor Mr. Rickman. He was poor Mr. Rickman, if you please, because he was considered to have entangled himself so inextricably with her. She knew that Miss Roots maintained that it was all her (Flossie's) own fault for holding Keith to his engagement; that Mr. Partridge had wondered why girls were in such a hurry to get married; and that Mr. Soper said she'd made a great mistake in ever taking up with a young fellow you could depend on with so little certainty. And the burden of it all was that Flossie had made a fool of herself and been made a fool of. So she was very bitter in her little heart against the man who was the cause of it all; and if she did not instantly throw Keith Rickman over, that was because Flossie was not really such a fool as for the moment she had been made to look.

But there was one person of the boarding-house whose opinion was as yet unknown to Flossie or to anybody else; it was doubtful indeed if it was known altogether to himself; for Mr. Spinks conceived that honour bound him to a superb reticence on the subject. He had followed with breathless anxiety every turn in the love affairs of Flossie and his friend. He could not deny that a base and secret exultation had possessed him on the amazing advent of Miss Harden; for love had made him preternaturally keen, and he was visited with mysterious intimations of the truth. He did not encourage these visitings. He had tried hard to persuade himself that he was glad for Flossie's sake when Miss Harden went away; when, whatever there had been between Rickets and the lady, it had come to nothing; when the wedding day remained fixed, immovably fixed. But he had not been glad at all. On the contrary he had suffered horribly, and had felt the subsequent delay as a cruel prolongation of his agony. In the irony of destiny, shortly before the fatal twenty-fifth, Mr. Spinks had been made partner in his uncle's business, and was now enjoying an income superior to Rickman's not only in amount but in security. If anything could have added to his dejection it was that. His one consolation hitherto had been that after all, if Rickman did marry Flossie, as he was not in a position to marry her, it came to the same thing in the long run. Now he saw himself cut off from that source of comfort by a solid four hundred a year with prospects of a rise. He could forego the obviously impossible; but in that rosy dawn of incarnation his dream appeared more than ever desirable. Whenever Mr. Spinks's imagination encountered the idea of marriage it had tried to look another way. Marriage remote and unattainable left Mr. Spinks's imagination in comparative peace; but brought within the bounds of possibility its appeal was simply maddening. And now, bringing it nearer still, so near that it was impossible to look another way, there came these disturbing suggestions of a misunderstanding between Rickman and his Beaver. The boarding-house knew nothing but that the wedding was put off because Rickman was in difficulties and could not afford to marry at the moment. Spinks would have accepted this explanation as sufficient if it had not been for the peculiar behaviour of Rickman, and the very mysterious and agitating change in Flossie's manner. Old Rickets had returned to his awful solitude. He absented himself entirely from the dinner-table. When you met him on the stairs he was incommunicative and gloomy; and whatever you asked him to do he was too busy to do it. His sole attention to poor Flossie was to take her for an occasional airing in the Park on Sunday afternoons. Spinks had come across them there walking sadly side by side. Flossie for propriety's sake would be making a little conversation as he went by; but Rickman had always the shut mouth and steady eyes of invincible determination.

What was it that Razors was so determined about? To marry Flossie? Or not to marry her? That was the question which agitated poor Spinks from morning till night, or rather from night till morning. The worst of it was that the very nature of his woes compelled him as an honourable person to keep them to himself.

But there was no secret which could be long concealed from the eyes of that clever lady, Miss Roots; and she had contrived in the most delicate manner to convey to the unfortunate youth that he had her sympathy. Spinks, bound by his honour, had used no words in divulging his agony; but their unspoken confidences had gone so far that Miss Roots at last permitted herself to say that it might be as well to find out whether "it was on or off."

"But," said the miserable Spinks, "would that be fair to Rickman?"

"I think so," said the lady, with a smile that would have been sweet had it been rather less astute. "Mind you, I'm not in their secrets; but I believe you really needn't be afraid of that."

"Yes. But how in Heaven's name am I to find out? I can't ask him, and I can't ask her."

"Why can't you ask them?"

Spinks was unable to say why; but his delicacy shrank from either course as in some subtle way unfair. Besides he distrusted Miss Roots's counsel, for she had not been nice to Flossie.

"Oh Lord," said Spinks, "what an orful mess I'm in!" He said it to himself; for he had resolved to talk no longer to Miss Roots.

He could have borne it better had not the terrible preoccupation of Rickman thrown Flossie on his hands. In common decency he had to talk to her at the dinner-table. But it was chivalry (surely) that drew him to her in the drawing-room afterwards. She had to be protected (poor Flossie) from the shrewdness of Miss Roots, the impertinence of Mr. Soper, and the painful sympathy of the other boarders. With the very best and noblest intentions in the world, Mr. Spinks descended nightly into that atmosphere of gloom, and there let loose his imperishable hilarity.

He was quite safe, he knew, as long as their relations could be kept upon a purely hilarious footing; but Flossie's manner intimated (what it had never intimated before) that she now realized and preferred the serious side of him; and there was no way by which the humorous Spinks was more profoundly flattered than in being taken seriously. Some nights they had the drawing-room to themselves but for the harmless presence of Mr. Partridge dozing in his chair; and then, to see Flossie struggling to keep a polite little smile hovering on a mouth too tiny to support it; to see her give up the effort and suddenly become grave; to see her turn away to hide her gravity with all the precautions another woman takes to conceal her merriment; to see her sitting there, absolutely unmoved by the diverting behaviour of Mr. Partridge in his slumber, was profoundly agitating to Mr. Spinks.

"I'm sure," said Flossie one night (it was nearly three weeks after the scene with Rickman in the Park), "I'm sure I don't know why we're laughing so much. There's nothing to laugh at that I can see."

Spinks could have have replied in Byron's fashion that if he laughed 'twas that he might not weep, but he restrained himself; and all he said was, "I like to see you larf."

"Well, you can't say you've ever seen me cry."

"No, I haven't. I shouldn't like to see that, Flossie. And I shouldn't like to be the one that made you."

"Wouldn't you?" Flossie put her pocket handkerchief to her little nose, and under the corner of it there peeped the tail-end of a lurking smile.

"No," said Spinks simply, "I wouldn't." He was thinking of Miss Roots. The theory of Rickman's bad behaviour had never entered his head. "What's more, I don't think any nice person would do it."

"Don't you?"

"No. Not any really nice person."

"It's generally," said Flossie, sweetly meditative, "the nicest person you know who can make you cry most. Not that I'm crying."

"No. But I can see that somebody's been annoying you, and I think I can guess pretty well who it is, too. Nothing would please me more than to 'ave five minutes' private conversation with that person." He was thinking of Miss Harden now.

"You mustn't dream of it. It wouldn't do, you know; it really wouldn't. Look here, promise me you'll never say a word."

"Well it's safe enough to promise. There aren't many opportunities of meeting."

"No, that's the worst of it, there aren't now. Still, you might meet him any minute on the stairs, or anywhere. And if you go saying things you'll only make him angry."

"Oh it's a him, is it?" (Now he was thinking of Soper.) "I know. Don't say Soper's been making himself unpleasant."

"He's always unpleasant."

"Is he? By 'Eaven, if I catch him!"

"Do be quiet. It isn't Mr. Soper."

"Isn't it?"

"No. How could it be? You don't call Mr. Soper nice, do you?"

Spinks was really quiet for a moment. "I say, Flossie, have you and Rickets been 'aving a bit of a tiff?"

"What do you want to know that for? It's nothing to you."

"Well, it isn't just my curiosity. It's because I might be able to help you, Floss, if you didn't mind telling me what it was. I'm not a clever fellow, but there's no one in this house understands old Razors as well as I do."

"Then you must be pretty sharp, for I can't understand him at all. Has he been saying anything to you?"

"Oh no, he wouldn't say anything. You don't talk about these things, you know."

"I thought he might—to you."

"Me? I'm the very last person he'd dream of talking to."

"I thought you were such friends."

"So we are. But you see he never talks about you to me, Flossie."

"Why ever not?"

"That's why. Because we're friends. Because he wouldn't think it fair—"

"Fair to who?"

"To me, of course."

"Why shouldn't it be fair to you?" Her eyes, close-lidded, were fixed upon the floor. As long as she looked at him Spinks held himself well in hand; but the sudden withdrawing of those dangerous weapons threw him off his guard.

"Because he knows I—Oh hang it all, that's what I swore I wouldn't say."

"You haven't said it."

"No, but I've made you see it."

His handsome face stiffened with horror at his stupidity. To let fall the slightest hint of his feeling was, he felt, the last disloyalty to Rickman. He had a vague idea that he ought instantly to go. But instead of going he sat there, silent, fixing on his own enormity a mental stare so concentrated that it would have drawn Flossie's attention to it, if she had not seen it all the time.

"If there's anything to see," said she, "there's no reason why I shouldn't see it."

"P'raps not. There's every reason, though, why I should have held my silly tongue."

"Why, what difference does it make?"

"It doesn't make any difference to you, of course, and it can't make any difference—really—to him; but it's a downright dishonourable thing to do, and that makes a jolly lot of difference to me. You see, I haven't any business to go and feel like this."

"Oh well, you can't help your feelings, can you?" she said softly. "Anybody may have feelings—"

"Yes, but a decent chap, you know, wouldn't let on that he had any—at least, not when the girl he—he—you know what I mean, it's what I mustn't say—when she and the other fellow weren't hitting it off very well together."

"Oh, you think it might make a difference then?"

"No, I don't—not reelly. It's only the feeling I have about it, don't you see. It seems somehow so orf'ly mean. Razors wouldn't have done it if it had been me, you know."

"But it couldn't have been you."

"Of course it couldn't," said the miserable Spinks with a weak spurt of anger; "that was only my way of putting it."

"What are you driving at? What ever did you think I said?"

"Never mind what you said. You're making me talk about it, and I said I wouldn't."

"When did you say that?"

"Ages ago—when Rickets first told me you—and he—"

"Oh that? That was so long ago that it doesn't matter much now."

"Oh, doesn't it though, it matters a jolly sight more. You said" (there was bitterness in his tone), "you said it couldn't have been me. As if I didn't know that."

"I didn't mean it couldn't have been you, not in that way. I only meant that you'd have—well, you'd have behaved very differently, if it had been you; and so I believe you would."

"You don't know how I'd 'ave behaved."

"I've a pretty good idea, though." She looked straight at him this time, and he grew strangely brave.

"Look here, Flossie," he said solemnly, "you know—as I've just let it out—that I'm most orf'ly gone on you. I don't suppose there's anything I wouldn't do for you except—well, I really don't know what you're driving at, but if it's anything to do with Razors, I'd rather not hear about it, if you don't mind. It isn't fair, really. You see, it's putting me in such a 'orribly delicate position."

"I don't think you're very kind, Sidney. You don't think of me, or what sort of a position you put me in. I'm sure I wouldn't have said a word, only you asked me to tell you all about it; you needn't say you didn't."

"That was when I thought, p'raps, I could help you to patch it up. But if I can't, it's another matter."

"Patch it up? Do you think I'd let you try? I don't believe in patching things up, once they're—broken off."

"I say Flossie, it hasn't come to that?"

"It couldn't come to anything else, the way it was going."

"Oh Lord"—Spinks buried a crimson face in his hands. If only he hadn't felt such a horrible exultation!

"I thought you knew. Isn't that what we've been talking about all the time?"

"I didn't understand. I only thought—he didn't tell me, mind you—I thought it was just put off because he couldn't afford to marry quite so soon."

"Don't you think three hundred a year is enough to marry on?"

"Well, I shouldn't care to marry on that myself; not if it wasn't regular. He's quite right, Flossie. You see, a man hasn't got only his wife to think of."

"No—I suppose he must think of himself a little too."

"Oh well, no; if he's a decent chap, he thinks of his children."

Flossie's face was crimson, too, while her thoughts flew to that unfurnished room in the brown house at Ealing. She was losing sight of Keith Rickman; for behind Keith Rickman there was Sidney Spinks; and behind Sidney Spinks there was the indomitable Dream. She did not look at Spinks, therefore, but gazed steadily at the top of Mr. Partridge's head. With one word Spinks had destroyed the effect he had calculated on from his honourable reticence. Perhaps it was because Flossie's thoughts had flown so far that her voice seemed to come from somewhere a long way off, too.

"What would you think enough to marry on, then?"

"Well, I shouldn't care to do it much under four hundred myself," he said guardedly.

"And I suppose if you hadn't it you'd expect a girl to wait for you any time until you'd made it?"

"Well of course I should, if we were engaged already. But I shouldn't ask any girl to marry me unless I could afford to keep her—"

"You wouldn't ask, but—"

"No, and I wouldn't let on that I cared for her either. I wouldn't let on under four hundred—certain."

"Oh," said Flossie very quietly. And Spinks was crushed under a sense of fresh disloyalty to Rickman. His defence of Rickman had been made to turn into a pleading for himself. "But Razors is different; he'll be making twice that in no time, you'll see. I shouldn't be afraid to ask any one if I was him."

Vainly the honourable youth sought to hide his splendour; Flossie had drawn from him all she needed now to know.

"Look, here, Floss, you say it's broken off. Would you mind telling me was it you—or was it he who did it?" His tone expressed acute anxiety on this point, for in poor Spinks's code of honour it made all the difference. But he felt that his question was clearly answered, for the silence of Razors argued sufficiently that it was he.

"Well," said Flossie with a touch of maidenly dignity, "whichever it was, it wasn't likely to be Keith."

Spinks's face would have fallen, but for its immense surprise. In this case Rickman ought, yes, he certainly ought to have told him. It wasn't behaving quite straight, he considered, to keep it from the man who had the best right in the world to know, a fellow who had always acted straight with him. But perhaps, poor chap, he was only waiting a little on the chance of the Beaver changing her mind.

"Don't you think, Flossie, that if he tried hard he could bring it on again?"

"No, he couldn't. Never. Not if he tried from now till next year. Not if he went on his bended knees to me."

Spinks reflected that Rickman's knees didn't take kindly to bending. "Haven't you been a little, just a little hard on him? He's such a sensitive little chap. If I was a woman I don't think I could let him go like that. You might let him have another try."

Poor Spinks was so earnest, so sincere, so unaffectedly determined not to take advantage of the situation, that it dawned on Flossie that dignity must now yield a little to diplomacy. She was not making the best possible case for herself by representing the rupture as one-sided. "To tell you the truth, Sidney, he doesn't want to try. We've agreed about it. We've both of us found we'd made a great mistake—".

"I wish I could be as sure of that."

"Why, what difference could it make to you?" said Flossie, turning on him the large eyes of innocence, eyes so dark, so deep, that her thoughts were lost in them.

"It would make all the difference in the world, if I knew you weren't making a lot bigger mistake now." He rose, "I think, if you don't mind, I'll 'ave a few words with Rickets, after all. I think I'll go up and see him now."

There was no change in the expression of her eyes, but her eyelids quivered. "No, Sidney, don't. For Goodness' sake don't go and say anything."

"I'm not going to say anything. I only want to know—"

"I've told you everything—everything I can."

"Yes; but it's what you can't tell me that I want to know."

"Well, but do wait a bit. Don't you speak to him before I see him. Because I don't want him to think I've given him away."

"I'll take good care he doesn't think that, Flossie. But I'm going to get this off my mind to-night."

"Well then, you must just take him a message from me. Say, I've thought it over and that I've told you everything. Don't forget. I've told you everything, say. Mind you tell him that before you begin about anything else. Then he'll understand."

"All right. I'll tell him."

Her eyes followed him dubiously as he stumbled over Mr. Partridge's legs in his excited crossing of the room. She was by no means sure of her ambassador's discretion. His heart would make no blunder; but could she trust his head?

Up to this point Flossie had played her game with admirable skill. She had, without showing one card of her own, caused Spinks to reveal his entire hand. It was not until she had drawn from him the assurance of his imperishable devotion, together with the exact amount of his equally imperishable income, that she had committed herself to a really decisive move. She was perfectly well aware of its delicacy and danger. Not for worlds would she have had Spinks guess that Rickman was still waiting for her decision. And yet, if Spinks referred rashly and without any preparation to the breaking off of the engagement, Rickman's natural reply would be that this was the first he had heard of it. Therefore did she so manoeuvre and contrive as to make Rickman suppose that Spinks was the accredited bearer of her ultimatum, while Spinks himself remained unaware that he was conveying the first intimation of it. It was an exceedingly risky thing to do. But Flossie, playing for high stakes, had calculated her risk to a nicety. She must make up her mind to lose something. As the game now stood the moral approbation of Spinks was more valuable to her than the moral approbation of Rickman; and in venturing this final move she had reckoned that the moral approbation of Rickman was all she had to lose. Unless, of course, he chose to give her away.

But Rickman could be trusted not to give her away.

When Spinks presented himself in Rickman's study he obtained admission in spite of the lateness of the hour. The youth's solemn agitation was not to be gainsaid. He first of all delivered himself of Flossie's message, faithfully, word for word.

"Oh, so she's told you everything, has she? And what did she tell you?"

"Why, that it was all over between you, broken off, you know."

"And you've come to me to know if it's true, is that it?"

"Well no, why should I? Of course it's true if she says so."

Rickman reflected for a moment; the situation, he perceived, was delicate in the extreme, delicate beyond his power to deal with it. But the god did not forsake his own, and inspiration came to him.