“I knew it, though.”

“You knew it?  How did you know it?”

“I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father.  He practically gave him the refusal of the library.  Which is exactly what I want to speak to you about.”

He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater difficulty.  For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done, point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman’s.

“If,” she said, “the library must be sold, I’m very glad that it’s your father who is going to buy it.”

He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father) that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.

It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.

Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view.  Her practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human, and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to nothing less than a moral miracle.  But Miss Harden would have a higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than his own, and if he considered that his father was morally bound to withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his remaining in it.  Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.

“Why shouldn’t he buy it?” she asked.

“Because, I’m afraid, selling it in—­in that way, you won’t make much money over it.”

“Well—­it’s not a question of making money, it’s a question of paying a debt.”

“How much you make—­or lose—­of course, depends on the amount of the debt—­what it was valued at.”

Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet.  She had the required fact at her fingers’ ends and instantly produced it.  “It was valued at exactly one thousand pounds.”

“And it should have been valued at four.  My father can’t give anything like that.  We ought to be able to find somebody who can.  But it might take a considerable time.”

“And there is no time.  What do you advise me to do then?”

“Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that would be all right.  If we can’t, I advise you to buy it back, or a part of it, yourself.  Buy back the books that make it valuable.  You’ve got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda printed by Wynken de Worde.” (He positively blushed as he consummated this final act of treachery to Rickman’s.) “And heaps of others equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so.  You can buy them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand.  If Pilkington collars the rest he’ll still be paid, and there may be something over.”