Mrs. Downey could not have shown more excitement if Flossie had told her that the kitchen boiler had burst.  “Flossie!  My goodness, whatever did he say?”

“He didn’t mind one bit.  Only—­you won’t tell him you told me not to touch them, will you, Mrs. Downey?” She brought her soft blushing cheek close to Mrs. Downey’s and the warmth of it told her tale.

And Mrs. Downey promised not to tell, pardoning the subterfuge for love’s sake, which excuses all.  “Has he gone, Flossie?” she inquired anxiously.

“No.  He’s not going.  He’s come back for good.”

“There!  Didn’t I say he would!”

“And what d’you think,” said Flossie, sitting down and spreading her plump arm on the secretary all over the accounts.  “He’s done it.  He did it up there.”

Mrs. Downey stared, and Flossie nodded as much as to say “Fact!”

“You don’t mean to say so?”

“Nobody’s more surprised than myself.”

The rest was kisses and congratulations, wholly magnanimous on Mrs. Downey’s part; for the announcement of Flossie’s engagement cost her one of the gayest, most desirable, and most remunerative of her brilliant circle.  Mr. Spinks (regarded by himself and everybody else as permanent) gave notice and vanished from that hour, carrying with him the hopes of Miss Ada Bishop.  Meanwhile Flossie (hitherto regarded from a merely decorative point of view) became a person of considerable importance in the boarding-house.  It was not merely that she was an engaged young lady; for, as Miss Bishop pointed out to her with some natural asperity, anybody can be engaged; but she had now the privilege, denied to any other boarder, of going in and out of Mr. Rickman’s study.  She said that she went in to tidy it; but strange to say, the more Flossie tidied it the more hopeless it became.  Mr. Rickman’s study was never what you might call a really tidy room; but at any rate there had always been a certain repose about it.  And now you could not well imagine a more unrestful place, a place more suggestive of hurry and disorder, of an utter lack of the leisure in which ideas ripen and grow great.

The table had become a troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr. Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the waters.  He had once profanely said that God’s world was a chaos he had got to work on.  Now it was his world that was chaos.  A tempestuous chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were.  Rickman’s genius, like Nature, destroyed in order that it might create; yet it seemed to him that nowadays the destruction was out of all proportion to the creation.  He sighed as he gazed at the piteous fragments that represented six months’ labour; fragments that wept blood; the torn and mutilated limbs of living thoughts; with here and there huge torsos of blank verse, lopped and hewn in the omnipotent fury of a god at war with his world; mixed up with undeveloped and ethereal shapes, the embryos of dreams.