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.