It was Spinks who explained the nature of the connection.

Poor Spinks, who had made the suggestion with an almost suicidally honourable intention, was to his immense astonishment merely sworn at for his interference.  And when Flossie brought Keith his tea that evening she found him in a most ungentlemanly humour.

She waited demurely for a pause in the storm that raged round Spinks and his confounded wine-merchant.  She cast a significant glance at the table strewn at that moment with the rough draft of Rickman’s tragedy.  (Flossie couldn’t understand why he could never write a thing out clearly from the first, nor why she shouldn’t write it for him at his dictation.)

“It’s all very well, Keith,” said she, “but if you can’t do more, I must.”

Before she left the room it was understood between them that Flossie would renounce her wine-merchant, and that they would be married, if possible, some time in the autumn.  He felt curiously shaken by that interview.

He spent the evening reading over what he had written, vainly trying to recall his inspiration, to kindle himself anew at his own flame.  Last night he had had more inspiration than he could do with; his ideas had come upon him with a rush, in a singing torrent of light.  His mind had been then almost intolerably luminous; now, there was twilight on its high parts and darkness over the face of its deep.  His ideas, arrested in mid-air, had been flung down into the deep; and from the farther shore he caught, as it were, the flutter of a gown and the light laughter of a fugitive Muse.

CHAPTER L

One day, four years after the publication of Saturnalia, Rickman received a letter in an unknown hand; a woman’s hand, but with a familiar vivid signature, the signature that is to be seen beneath the portraits of Walter Fielding, the greatest among contemporary poets, the living god of Rickman’s idolatry.

“Dear Sir,” he wrote (or rather, some woman had written for him), “I came across your Poems the other day; by chance, I must confess, and not by choice.  I have something to say to you about them, and I would therefore be glad if you could call on me here, to-morrow.  I say, call on me; for I am an old man, and you, if I am not mistaken, are a young one; and I say to-morrow, because the day after to-morrow I may not have that desire to see you which I feel to-day.

     “Faithfully yours,

     “Walter Fielding.

     “PS.—­You had better come in time for lunch at one o’clock.”

Rickman’s hand trembled as he answered that letter.  All evening he said to himself, “To-morrow I shall see Fielding”; and the beating of his heart kept him awake until the dawn of the wonderful day.  And as he dressed he said to himself, “To-day I shall see Fielding.”  That he should see him was enough.  He could hardly bear to think what Fielding had to say to him.