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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXVII

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

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

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