Rickman, it seemed, was doomed to inspire that sense of agonizing uncertainty.

It was the second evening after his return. The Dinner was not going off well. Miss Walker was depressed, Mr. Spinks was not in his accustomed spirits, and Mrs. Downey had been going about with red eyes all day. Mr. Rickman had confided to her the deplorable state of his finances. And Mrs. Downey had said to herself she had known from the first that he would not be permanent.

He didn’t want to be permanent. He desired to vanish, to disappear from the boarding-house and the boarders, and from Poppy Grace on the balcony next door; to get away from every face and every voice that he had known before he knew Lucia Harden’s. Being convinced that he would never see her again, he wanted to be alone with his vivid and piercing memory of her. At first it was the pain that pierced. She had taken out her little two-edged sword and stabbed him. It wouldn’t have mattered, he said, if the sword had been a true little sword, but it wasn’t; it had snapt and left a nasty bit of steel inside him. Her last phrase was the touch that finished him. But the very sting of it created a healthy reaction. By his revolt against that solitary instance of her cruelty he had recovered his right to dwell upon her kindness. He dwelt upon it until at times he entered again into possession of the tender, beautiful, dominating dream. So intense was his hallucination, that as he walked alone in any southerly direction he still felt Muttersmoor on his right hand and Harcombe on his left, and he had waked in the morning to the sound of the sea beating upon Harmouth beach.

But these feelings visited him more rarely in the boarding-house than elsewhere. That was why he wanted to get away from it. The illusion was destroyed by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table. Not that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before. He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even Spinks and Flossie as people he had once intimately known. Miss Roots alone, for some inscrutable reason, seemed familiar, in keeping with that divine experience to which the actual hour did violence. It was almost as if she understood.

A shrewdly sympathetic glance went out from a pair of hazel eyes set in a plain, clever, strenuous face. Miss Roots was glad, she said, to see him back again. He turned to her with the question that had never failed to flatter and delight. Was Miss Roots doing anything specially interesting now? But there was no interest in his tone.

Miss Roots looked up with a smile that would have been gay if it had not been so weary. Yes, she was collecting material for a book on Antimachus of Colophon. No, not her own book.

(At the mention of Antimachus of Colophon, Mr. Soper folded his arms and frowned with implacable resentment. Mr. Soper was convinced that these subjects were introduced on purpose to exclude him from the conversation.)

Miss Roots, like Mr. Rickman, lived apart from the murmur of the boarding-house. She had raised a barrier of books in a bedroom six feet by nine, behind which she worked obscurely. She had never been known to converse until Mr. Rickman came. A sort of fluctuating friendship had sprung up between Mr. Rickman and Miss Roots. He had an odd feeling, half pity, half liking, for this humble servant of literature, doomed to its labour, ignorant of its delight. And yet Miss Roots had a heart which went out to the mad-cap journalist, wild with youth and the joy of letters. And now these things were coming back to her. The sources of intellectual desire had been drying up with the blood in her cheeks; but when Rickman came they began to flow again. When Rickman talked as only he could talk, Miss Roots felt a faint fervour, a reminiscent thrill. She preened her poor little thoughts as if for pairing time, when soul fluttered to soul across the dinner-table. She knew that, intellectually speaking, she had been assigned to Rickman; for Mrs. Downey held that just as Mr. Rickman was the first to rouse Miss Roots to conversation, so Miss Roots alone had the power of drawing him out to the best advantage.

“Indeed?” said Rickman in a voice devoid of all intelligence.

Now if anything could have drawn Mr. Rickman out it was Antimachus of Colophon. Four weeks ago he would have been more interested in Antimachus than Miss Roots herself, he would have talked about him by the hour together. So that when he said nothing but “Indeed?” she perceived that something was the matter with him. But she also perceived that he was anxious to be talked to, therefore she talked on.

Miss Roots was right; though his mind was unable to take in a word she said to him, he listened, soothed by the singular refinement of her voice. It was a quality he had not noticed in it four weeks ago. Suddenly a word flashed out, dividing the evening with a line of light.

“So you’ve been staying in Harmouth?”

He started noticeably, and looked at her as if he had not heard. Miss Roots seemed unaware of having said anything specially luminous; she repeated her question with a smile.

“Why?” he asked. “Have you been there?”

“I’ve not only been there, I was born there.”

He looked at her. Miss Roots had always been, to say the least of it, prosaic, and now it was as if poetry had dropped from her lips, as if she had said, “I too was born in Arcadia.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you saw that beautiful old house by the river?”

“Which beautiful old house by the river?”

“Court House. You see it from the bridge. You must have noticed it.”

“Oh, yes, I know the one you mean.”

“Did you happen to see or hear anything of the lady who lives in it? Miss Lucia Harden?”

“I I must have seen her, but I can’t exactly say. Do you know her?”

His words seemed to be torn from him in pieces, shaken by the violent beating of his heart.

“Know her?” said Miss Roots. “I lived five years with her. I taught her.”

He looked at her again in wonder, in wonder and a sort of tenderness. For a second his heart had come to life again and leapt like a lunatic to his lips. Happily his wits were there before it. He stroked his upper lip, as if brushing away some wild phrase that sat there.

“Then I’m sure,” he said, contriving a smile, “that Miss Harden is an exceedingly well educated lady.”

Miss Roots’ hazel eyes looked up at him intelligently; but as they met that unnatural smile of gallantry there was a queer compression of her shrewd and strenuous face. She changed the subject. He wondered if by any chance she knew; if she corresponded with Miss Harden; if Miss Harden had mentioned him in the days before her troubles came; if Miss Roots were trying to test him, to draw him out as she had never drawn him out before. No, it was not in the least likely that Miss Harden should have mentioned him; if she had, Miss Roots would have said so. She would never have set a trap for him; she was a kind and straightforward little lady. Her queer look meant nothing, it was only her way of dealing with a compliment.

The sweat on his forehead witnessed to the hot labour of his thought. He wondered whether anybody had observed it.

Mr. Soper had, and drew his own conclusions.

“’E’s been at it again,” said Mr. Soper, with significance. But nobody took any notice of him; and upstairs in the drawing-room that night his bon-bons failed to charm.

“I suppose you’re pleased,” said he, approaching his hostess, “now you’ve got Mr. Rickman back again?”

A deeper flush than the Dinner could account for was Mrs. Downey’s sole reply.

“’is manners ’aven’t improved since ’is residence in the country. I met ’im in the City to-day wy, we were on the same slab of pavement and ’e went past and took no more notice of me than if I’d been the Peabody statue.”

“Depend upon it, he was full of something.”

“Full of unsociability and conceit. And wot is ’e? Wot is ’e? ’Is father keeps a bookshop.”

“A very fine bookshop, too,” said Miss Roots. It was the first time that she had ever spoken of her own accord to Mr. Soper.

“He may have come out lately, but you should have seen the way ’e began, in a dirty little second ’and shop in the City. A place,” said Mr. Soper, “I wouldn’t ’ave put my nose into if I was paid. Crammed full of narsty, mangy, ’Olloway Street rubbish.”

“Look here now,” said Mr. Spinks, now scarlet with fury, “you needn’t throw his business in his face, for he’s chucked it.”

“I don’t think any the better of him for that.”

“Don’t you? Well, he won’t worry himself into fits about your opinion.”

“’Ad he got a new berth then, when he flung up the old one?”

Now one thing Mrs. Downey, with all her indulgence, did not permit, and that was any public allusion to her boarders’ affairs. She might not refuse to discuss them privately with Miss Bramble or Miss Roots, but that was a very different thing. Therefore she maintained a dignified silence.

“Well, then, I should like to know ’ow he’s going to pay ’is way.”

Before the grossness of this insinuation Mrs. Downey abandoned her policy of silence.

“Some day,” said Mrs. Downey, “Mr. Rickman will be in a very different position to wot he is now. You mark my words.” (And nobody marked them but little Flossie Walker.)

Two tears rolled down Mrs. Downey’s face and mingled with the tartan of her blouse. A murmur of sympathy went round the room, and Mr. Soper perceived that the rest of the company were sitting in an atmosphere of emotion from which he was shut out.

“I beg of you, Mr. Soper, that you will let Mr. Rickman be, for once this evening. Living together as we do, we all ought,” said Mrs. Downey, “to respect each other’s feelings.”

“Ah feelings. Wot sort of respect does your young gentleman ever show to mine? Takes me up one day and cuts me dead the next.”

“He wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing if he hadn’t been worried in his mind. Mr. Rickman, Mr. Soper, is in trouble.”

Mr. Soper was softened. “Is he? Well, really, I’m very sorry to hear it, very sorry, I’m sure.”

“My fear is,” said Mrs. Downey, controlling her voice with difficulty, “that he may be leaving us.”

“If he does, Mrs. Downey, nobody will regret it more than I do.”

“Well, I hope it won’t come to that.”

Mrs. Downey did not consider it politic to add that she was prepared to make any sacrifice to prevent it. It was as well that Mr. Soper should realize the consequences of an inability to pay your way. She was not prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of keeping him.

“But what,” said Mrs. Downey to herself, “will the Dinner be without Mr. Rickman?”

The Dinner was, in her imagination, a function, a literary symposium. At the present moment, if you were to believe Mrs. Downey, no dinner-table in London could show such a gathering of remarkable people. But to none of these remarkable people did Mrs. Downey feel as she felt to Mr. Rickman, who was the most remarkable of them all. By her own statement she had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for studying the ways of genius. There was a room at Mrs. Downey’s which she exhibited with pride as “Mr. Blenkinsop’s room.” Mr. Blenkinsop was a poet, and Mr. Rickman had succeeded him. If Mrs. Downey did not immediately recognize Mr. Rickman as a genius it was because he was so utterly unlike Mr. Blenkinsop. But she had felt from the first that, as she expressed it, “there was something about him,” though what it was she couldn’t really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in her heart “He will not be permanent.” The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability’s decree. “Perhaps,” she said, “we might come to some arrangement.”

All night long in her bedroom on the ground-floor, Mrs. Downey lay awake considering what arrangement could be come to. This was but a discreet way of stating her previous determination to make any sacrifice if only she could keep him. The sacrifice which Mrs. Downey (towards the small hours of the morning) found herself contemplating amounted to no less than four shillings a week. Occupying his present bed-sitting room he should remain for twenty-one shillings a week instead of twenty-five.

Unfortunately, at breakfast the next morning their evil genius prompted Mr. Spinks and Mr. Soper to display enormous appetites, and Mrs. Downey, to her everlasting shame, was herself tempted of the devil. A fall of four shillings a week, serious enough in itself, was not to be contemplated with gentlemen eating their heads off in that fashion. It would have to be made up in some way, to be taken out of somebody or something. She would yes, she would take it out of them all round by taking it out of the Dinner. And yet when it came to the point, Mrs. Downey’s soul recoiled from the immorality of this suggestion. There rose before her, as in a vision, the Dinner of the future, solid in essentials but docked of its splendour, its character and its pride. No; that must not be. What the Dinner was now it must remain as long as there were eight boarders to eat it. If Mrs. Downey made any sacrifice she must make it pure.

“On the condition,” said Mrs. Downey by way of putting a business-like face on it, “on the condition of his permanence.”

But it seemed that twenty-one shillings were more than Mr. Rickman could afford to pay.

Mrs. Downey spent another restless night, and again towards the small hours of the morning she decided on a plan. After breakfast she watched Mr. Soper out of the dining-room, closed the door behind him with offensive and elaborate precaution, and approached Mr. Rickman secretly. If he would promise not to tell the other gentlemen, she would let him have the third floor back for eighteen shillings.

Mr. Rickman stood by the door like one in great haste to be gone. He could not afford eighteen shillings either. He would stay where he was on the old terms for a fortnight, at the end of which time, he said firmly, he would be obliged to go. Mr. Rickman’s blue eyes were dark and profound with the pathos of recent illness and suffering, so that he appeared to be touched by Mrs. Downey’s kindness. But he wasn’t touched by it; no, not the least bit in the world. His heart inside him was like a great lump of dried leather. Mrs. Downey looked at him, sighed, and said no more. Things were more serious with him than she had supposed.

Things were very serious indeed.

His absence at Harmouth had entailed consequences that he had not foreseen. During those four weeks, owing to the perturbation of his mind and the incessant demands on his time, he had written nothing. True, while he was away his poems had found a publisher; but he had nothing to expect from them; it would be lucky if they paid their expenses. On his return to town he found that his place on The Planet had been filled up. At the most he could only reckon on placing now and then, at infrequent intervals, an article or a poem. The places would be few, for from the crowd of popular magazines he was excluded by the very nature of his genius. To make matters worse, he owed about thirty pounds to Dicky Pilkington. The sum of two guineas, which The Museion owed him for his sonnet, would, if he accepted Mrs. Downey’s last offer, keep him for exactly two weeks. And afterwards? Afterwards, of course, he would have to borrow another ten pounds from Dicky, hire some den at a few shillings a week, and try his luck for as many months as his money held out. Then there would be another “afterwards,” but that need not concern him now.

The only thing that concerned him was the occult tie between him and Miss Roots. Up to the day fixed for his departure he was drawn by an irresistible fascination to Miss Roots. His manner to her became marked by an extreme gentleness and sympathy. Of course it was impossible to believe that it was Miss Roots who lit the intellectual flame that burnt in Lucia. Enough to know that she had sat with her in the library and in the room where she made music; that she had walked with her in the old green garden, and on Harcombe Hill and Muttersmoor. Enough to sit beside Miss Roots and know that all the time her heart was where his was, and that if he were to speak of these things she would kindle and understand. But he did not speak of them; for from the way Miss Roots had referred to Lucia Harden and to Court House, it was evident that she knew nothing of what had happened to them, and he did not feel equal to telling her. Lucia’s pain was so great a part of his pain that as yet he could not touch it. But though he never openly approached the subject of Harmouth, he was for ever skirting it, keeping it in sight.

He came very near to it one evening, when, finding himself alone with Miss Roots in the back drawing-room, he asked her how long it was since she had been in Devonshire. It seemed that it was no longer ago than last year. Only last year? It was still warm then, the link between her and the woman whom he loved. He found himself looking at Miss Roots, scanning the lines of her plain face as if it held for him some new and wonderful significance. For him that faced flamed transfigured as in the moment when she had first spoken of Lucia. The thin lips which had seemed to him so utterly unattractive had touched Lucia’s, and were baptized into her freshness and her charm; her eyes had looked into Lucia’s and carried something of their light. In her presence he drifted into a sort of mysticism peculiar to lovers, seeing the hand of a holy destiny in the chance that had seated him beside her. Though her shrewdness might divine his secret he felt that with her it would be safe.

As for his other companions of the dinner-table he was obliged to admit that they displayed an admirable delicacy. After Mrs. Downey’s revelation not one of them had asked him what he had been doing those four weeks. Spinks had a theory, which he kept to himself. Old Rickets had been having a high old time. He had eloped with a barmaid or an opera girl. For those four weeks, he had no doubt, Rickets had been gloriously, ruinously, on the loose. Mrs. Downey’s speculations had taken the same turn. Mr. Rickman’s extraordinary request that all his clean linen should be forwarded to him at once had set her mind working; it suggested a young man living in luxury beyond his means. Mrs. Downey’s fancy kindled and blushed by turns as it followed him into a glorious or disreputable unknown. Whatever the adventures of those four weeks she felt that they were responsible for his awful state of impecuniosity. And yet she desired to keep him. “There is something about him,” said Mrs. Downey to Miss Roots, and paused searching for the illuminating word; “something that goes to your heart without ’is knowing it.”

She had found it, the nameless, ineluctable charm.

And so for those last days the Dinner became a high funereal ceremony, increasing in valedictory splendour that proclaimed unmistakably, “Mr. Rickman is going.”

In a neighbouring street he had found a room, cheap and passably clean, and (failing a financial miracle worked on his behalf) he would move into it to-morrow. He was going, now that he would have given anything to stay.

In the dining-room after dinner, Spinks with a dejected countenance, sat guarding for the last time the sacred silence of Rickman. They had finished their coffee, when the door that let out the maid with empty cups let in Miss Bishop, Miss Bramble and Miss Walker.

First came Miss Bishop; she advanced in a side-long and embarrassed manner, giggling, and her face for once was as red as her hair. She carried a little wooden box which with an unaccustomed shyness she asked him to accept. The sliding lid disclosed a dozen cedar pencils side by side, their points all ready sharpened, also a card with the inscription: “Mr. Rickman, with best wishes from Ada Bishop.” At one corner was a date suggesting that the gift marked an epoch; at the other the letters P.T.O. The reverse displayed this legend, “If you ever want any typing done, I’ll always do it for you at 6d. a thou. Only don’t let on. Yours, A.B.” Now Miss Bishop’s usual charge was, as he knew, a shilling per thousand.

“Gentlemen,” said she, explaining away her modest offering, “always like anything that saves them trouble.” At this point, Miss Bishop, torn by a supreme giggle, vanished violently from the scene.

Mr. Rickman smiled sadly, but his heart remained as before. He had not loved Miss Bishop.

Next came Miss Bramble with her gift mysteriously concealed in silver paper. “All brain-workers,” said Miss Bramble, “suffered from cold feet.” So she had just knitted him a pair of socks bed-socks” (in a whisper), “that would help to keep him warm.” Her poor old eyes were scarlet, not so much from knitting the bed-socks, as from contemplating the terrible possibility of his needing them.

Under Mr. Rickman’s waistcoat there was the least little ghost of a quiver. He had not loved Miss Bramble; but Miss Bramble had loved him. She had loved him because he was young, and because he had sometimes repeated to her the little dinner-table jests that she was too deaf to hear.

Last of the three, very grave and demure, came Flossie, and she, like her friend, carried her gift uncovered. She proffered it with her most becoming air of correctness and propriety. It was a cabinet photograph of herself in her best attitude, her best mood and her best blue blouse. It was framed beautifully and appropriately in white silk, embroidered with blue forget-me-nots by Flossie’s clever hands. She had sat up half the night to finish it. He took it gently from her and looked at it for what seemed to Flossie an excessively long time. He was trying to think of something particularly pretty and suitable to say. In his absorption he did not notice that he was alone with her, that as Flossie advanced Spinks and Soper had withdrawn.

“I don’t know whether you’ll care for it,” said she. She was standing very close beside him, and her face under the gas-light looked pale and tender.

“Of course I’ll care for it.” He laid her gift on the table beside the others and stood contemplating them. She saw him smile. He was smiling at the bed-socks.

“You are all much too good to me, you know.”

“Oh, Mr. Rickman, you’ve been so awfully good to me.”

He looked round a little anxiously and perceived that they were alone.

“No, Flossie,” he said, “I’ve not been good to anyone, I’m not very good to myself. All the same, I’m not an utter brute; I shan’t forget you.”

Flossie’s eyes had followed, almost jealously, the movement of his hand in putting down her gift; and they had rested there, fixed on her own portrait, and veiled by their large white lids. She now raised them suddenly, and over their black profundity there moved a curious golden glitter that flashed full on his face.

“You didn’t remember me, much, last time you went away.”

“I didn’t remember anybody, Flossie; I had too much to think of.”

It struck him that this was the first time she had looked him full in the face; but it did not strike him that it was also the first time that he had found himself alone in a room with her, though they had been together many times out of doors and in crowded theatres and concert halls. Her look conveyed some accusation that he at first failed to understand. And then there came into his mind the promise he had made to her at Easter, to take her to the play, the promise broken without apology or explanation. So she still resented it, did she? Poor little Flossie, she was so plump and pretty, and she had been so dependent on him for the small pleasures of her life.

“You’re always thinking,” said Flossie, and laughed.

“I’m sorry, Flossie; it’s a disgusting habit, I own. I’ll make up for it some day. We’ll do a lot of theatres and and things together, when my ship comes in.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rickman,” said she with a return to her old demeanour. “And now I suppose I’d better say good-night?”

She turned. They said good-night. He sprang to open, the door for her. As she went through it, his heart, if it did not go with her, was touched, most palpably, unmistakably touched at seeing her go. He had not loved Flossie; but he might have loved her.

Mr. Soper, who had been waiting all the while on the stairs, walked in through the open door. He closed it secretly.

He laid his hand affectionately on Rickman’s shoulder. “Rickman,” he said solemnly, “while I ’ave the opportunity, I want to speak to you. If it should ’appen that a fiver would be useful to you, don’t you hesitate to come to me.”

“Oh, Soper, thanks most awfully. Really, no, I couldn’t think of it.”

“But I mean it. I really do. So don’t you ’esitate; and there needn’t be any hurry about repayment. That,” said Mr. Soper, “is quite immaterial.” Failing to extract from Rickman any distinct promise, he withdrew; but not before he had pressed upon his immediate acceptance a box of his favourites, the Flor di Dindigul.

By this time Rickman’s heart was exceedingly uncomfortable inside him. He had hated Soper.

He thought it was all over, and he was glad to escape from these really very trying interviews to the quiet of his own room. There he found Spinks sitting on his bed waiting for him. Spinks had come to lay before him an offering and a scheme. The offering was no less than two dozen of gents’ best all-wool knitted hose, double-toed and heeled. The scheme was for enabling Rickman thenceforward to purchase all manner of retail haberdashery at wholesale prices by the simple method of impersonating Spinks. At least in the long-run it amounted to that, and Rickman had some difficulty in persuading Spinks that his scheme, though in the last degree glorious and romantic, was, from an ethical point of view, not strictly feasible.

“What a rum joker you are, Rickman. I never thought of that. I wonder ” (He mused in an unconscious endeavour to restore the moral balance between him and Rickman). “I wonder who’ll put you to bed, old chappy, when you’re tight.”

“Don’t fret, Spinky. I’m almost afraid that I shall never be tight again in this world.”

“Oh, Gosh,” said Spinks, and sighed profoundly. Then, with a slight recovery, “do you mean you won’t be able to afford it?”

“You can put it that way, if you like.”

In time Spinks left him and Rickman was alone. Just as he was wondering whether or no he would pack his books up before turning in, there was a soft rap at his door. He said, “Come in” to the rap; and to himself he said, “Who next?”

It was Mrs. Downey; she glanced round the room, looked at Flossie’s photograph with disapproval, and removed, not without severity, Miss Bramble’s bed-socks from a chair. She had brought no gift; but she sat down heavily like a woman who has carried a burden about with her all day, and can carry it no farther. Her features were almost obliterated with emotion and glazed with tears that she made no effort to remove.

“Mr. Rickman,” she said, “do you reelly wish to go, or do you not?”

He looked up surprised. “My dear Mrs. Downey, I don’t; believe me. Did I ever say I did?”

Her face grew brighter and rounder till the very glaze on it made it shine like a great red sun. “Well, we’d all been wondering, and some of us said one thing, and some another, and I didn’t know what to think. But if you want to stay perhaps we can come to some arrangement.” It was the consecrated phrase.

He shook his head.

“Come, I’ve been thinking it over. You won’t be paying less than five shillings a week for your empty room, perhaps more?”

He would, he said, be paying six shillings.

“There now! And that, with your food, makes sixteen shillings at the very least.”

“Well it depends upon the food.”

“I should think it did depend upon it.” Mrs. Downey’s face literally blazed with triumph. She said to herself, “I was right. Mr. Spinks said he’d take it out of his clothes. Miss Bramble said he’d take it out of his fire. I said he’d take it out of his dinner.”

“Now,” she continued, “if you didn’t mind moving into the front attic it’s a good attic for a time, I could let you ’ave that, and board you, for fifteen shillings a week, or for fourteen, I could, and welcome. As I seldom let that attic, it would be money in the pocket to me.”

“Come,” she went on, well pleased. “I know all about it. Why, Mr. Blenkinsop, when he first started to write, he lived up there six months at a time. He had his ups, you may say, and his downs. One year in the attic and the next on the second floor, having his meals separate and his own apartments. Then up he’d go again quite cheerful, as regularly as the bills came round.” Here Mrs. Downey entered at some length upon the history of the splendour and misery of Mr. Blenkinsop. “And that, I suppose,” said Mrs. Downey, “is what it is to be a poet.”

“In fact,” said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss Roots, “talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly understand the allusion.”

After about half an hour’s conversation she left him without having received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal. That did not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman was not going after all.

At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door. It was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the next evening. Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the signature made his brain reel for a second. He stood staring at it. From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.

Jewdwine? Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do with him.

Jewdwine was another link. And at that thought his heart heaved and became alive again.