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

She mistook his silence for hesitation, and it was her turn to become diffident and shy.  “The salary would not be very large, I’m afraid—­”

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

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

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

“Of course,” she said, “you must think it over.”

“Miss Harden, I don’t know how to thank you.  I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything.  Think.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

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

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

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

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