“I’ll take you to a good one some day.”

“Soon?”

“Well, I’m afraid not very soon.”  He smiled; for the play he thought of taking her to was not yet written; would never be written if many of his evenings were like this.  But to Flossie, meditating, his words bore only one interpretation—­that Keith was really very much worse off than she had taken him to be.

As they lingered on the doorstep in Tavistock Place, a young man approached them in a deprecating manner from the other side of the street, and took off his hat to Flossie.

“Hallo, Spinks!” said Rickman.

“That you, Razors?” said Spinks.

“It is.  What are you doing here?”

“Oh nothing.  I was in the neighbourhood, and I thought I’d have a look at the old place.”

“Come in, will you? (If they don’t come, Flossie, I shall have to use my latch-key.”)

“Not to-night, thanks, it’s a bit too late.  I’d better be going.”  But he did not go.

“I hope,” said Flossie politely, “you’re comfortable where you are now?”

“Oh, very comfortable, very comfortable indeed.”  Yet his voice had a melancholy sound, and under the gas-light his face (a face not specially designed for pathos) looked limp and utterly dejected.

“I think, Keith,” said Flossie, “you’d better ring again.”  Ringing was a concession to propriety that Flossie insisted on and he approved.  He rang again; and Mrs. Downey in a beautiful wrapper herself opened the door.  At the sight of Spinks she gave a joyful exclamation and invited him into the hall.  They left him there.

“What’s up?” asked Rickman as they parted on his landing.

“Who with?  Sidney?  I can’t tell you—­really.”

“I wonder why he left.”

“I can’t tell you that, either.”  They said good-night at the foot of the stairs, and she kissed him laughing.  And the two men heard it echoing in their dreams, that mysterious laughter of woman, which is as the ripple over the face of the deep.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Isaac Rickman stood in his front shop at the close of a slack winter day.  He looked about him with a gaze uncheered by the contemplation of his plate-glass and mahogany; and as he looked he gathered his beard into a serious meditative hand, not as of old, but with a certain agitation in the gesture.

Isaac was suffering from depression; so was the book-trade.  Every year the pulse of business beat more feebly, and in the present year, eighteen ninety-six, it was almost standing still.  Isaac had seen the little booksellers one by one go under, but their failure put no heart into him; and now the wave of depression was swallowing him up too.  He had not got the grip of the London book-trade; he would never build any more Gin Palaces of Art; he had not yet freed himself from the power of Pilkington; and more than all his depression the mortgage of the Harden Library weighed heavily on his soul.  The Public in which he trusted had grown tricky; and he found that even capital and incomparable personal audacity are powerless against the malignity of events.