And all the time his genius, already vigorous enough in all conscience, throve on his suffering as it had thriven on his joy.  In that summer of ninety-two, Rickman’s Saturnalia were followed by On Harcombe Hill and The Four Winds, and that greatest poem of his lyric period, The Song of Confession.  Upon the young poet about town there had descended, as it were out of heaven, a power hitherto undreamed of and undivined.  No rapture of the body was ever so winged and flamed, or lost itself in such heights and depths of music, as that cry of the passion of his soul.

CHAPTER XLI

Meanwhile, of a Sunday evening, Miss Poppy Grace wondered why Ricky-ticky never by any chance appeared upon his balcony.  At last, coming home about ten o’clock from one of his walks to Hampstead, he found Poppy leaning out over her balcony most unmistakably on the look-out.

“Come in and have some supper,” said she.

“No thanks, I fancy it’s a little late.”

“Better late than never, when it’s supper with me.  Catch!” And Poppy, in defiance of all propriety, tossed her latch-key over the balcony.  And somehow that latch-key had to be returned.  He did not use it, but rang, with the intention of handing it to the servant; an intention divined and frustrated by Poppy, who opened the door to him herself.

“Don’t go away,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Not now, I think—­”

Her eyes were hideous to him in their great rings of paint and bistre.

“Why ever not?  It’ll only tyke a minute.  Come in; there’s nobody up there that matters.”

And because he had no desire to be brutal or uncivil, he went up into the room he knew so well.  It being summer, the folding doors were thrown wide open, and in the room beyond they came upon a large lady in a dirty tea-gown, eating lobster.  For Poppy, now that she saw respectability departing from her, held out to it a pathetic little hand, and the tea-gown, pending an engagement as heavy matron on the provincial stage, was glad enough to play Propriety in Miss Grace’s drawing-room.  To-night Poppy made short work of Propriety.  She waited with admirable patience while the large lady (whom she addressed affectionately as Tiny) followed up the last thin trail of mayonnaise; but when Tiny showed a disposition to toy with the intricacies of an empty claw, Poppy protested.

“Hurry up and clear out, there’s a dear.  I want to give Rickets his supper, and we haven’t got a minute to spare.”

And Tiny, who seemed to know her business, hurried up and cleared out.

But Rickets didn’t want any supper, and Poppy was visibly abstracted and depressed.  She mingled whipped cream with minute fragments of lobster, and finally fell to torturing a sandwich with a spoon; and all with an immense affectation of not having a minute to spare.