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

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

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

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

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

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