“Do you understand it?”

“Not I. Do you understand it yourself?  Would you know it if you met it in the street?”

“It never is in the street.”

“How do you know?  You can’t say where it is or what it is.  You can’t say anything about it at all.  But while you’re all trying to find out, the most unlikely person suddenly gets up and produces it.  And he can’t tell you where he got it.  Though, if you ask him, ten to one he’ll tell you he’s been sitting on it all the time.”

“Well,” said Jewdwine, “tell me when you’ve ‘sat on’ anything yourself.”

“I will.”  He rose to go, being anxious to avoid the suspicion of having pushed that question to a personal issue.  It was only in reply to more searching inquiries that he mentioned (on the doorstep) that a book of his was coming out in the autumn.

“What, Helen?”

“No. Saturnalia and—­a lot of things you haven’t seen yet.”  It was a rapid nervous communication, made in the moment of withdrawing his hand from Jewdwine’s.

“Who’s your publisher?” called out Jewdwine.

Rickman laughed as the night received him.  “Vaughan!” he shouted from the garden gate.

“Now, what on earth,” said Jewdwine, “could have been his motive for not consulting me?” He had not got the clue to the hesitation and secrecy of the young man’s behaviour.  He did not know that there were three things which Rickman desired at any cost to keep pure—­his genius, his friendship for Horace Jewdwine, and his love for Lucia Harden.

CHAPTER XL

The end of May found Rickman still at Mrs. Downey’s, established on the second floor in a glory that exceeded the glory of Mr. Blenkinsop.  He had now not only a bedroom, but a study, furnished with a simplicity that had the effect of luxury, and lined from floor to ceiling with his books.  Mrs. Downey had agreed that Mr. Rickman should, whenever the mysterious fancy took him, have his meals served to him in his own apartment after the high manner of Mr. Blenkinsop; and it was under protest that she accepted any compensation for the break thus made in the triumphal order of the Dinner.

Here then at last, he was absolutely alone and free.  Feeling perhaps how nearly it had lost him, or impressed by the sudden change in his position, the boarding-house revered this privacy of Rickman’s as a sacred thing.  Not even Mr. Soper would have dared to violate his virgin leisure.  The charm of it was unbroken, it was even heightened by the inaudible presence of Miss Roots in her den on the same floor.  Miss Roots indeed was the tie that bound him to Mrs. Downey’s; otherwise the dream of his affluence would have been chambers in Westminster or the Temple.  For his income, in its leap from zero to a fluctuating two hundred a year, appeared to him as boundless affluence.  To be sure, Jewdwine had expressly stated that it would