She shook her head, this time with disapproval.  “You shouldn’t say these things.”

“Do you mean, I shouldn’t say them, or shouldn’t say them to you?”

“Well, I think you shouldn’t say them to me.  Don’t you see that it sounds as if I had done or said something to make you feel like that.”

“You?  Good Heavens! rather not!  But whatever you said or did, I couldn’t help knowing how you thought of me.”

“And how was that?”

“Well, as half a poet, you know, and half a hair-dresser.”

“That’s funny; but it’s another of the things you shouldn’t say.  Because you know it isn’t true.”

“I only say them because I want you to see how impossible it was.”

“For me to help you?”

“Yes.”

“I do see it.  It was impossible—­but not for any of the reasons you suppose.  If it had been possible—­”

“What then?”

“Then, perhaps, I needn’t have felt so sorry and ashamed.  You know I really am a little bit ashamed of having asked a great poet to be my private secretary.”

It was thus that she extricated herself from the embarrassing position in which his clumsiness had placed her.  For he saw what she meant when she told him that he should not say these things to her.  He had made her feel that she ought to defend him from the charges he had brought against himself, when she knew them to be true, when her gentleness could only have spared him at the expense of her sincerity.  How beautifully she had turned it off.  He refrained from the obvious pretty speeches.  His eyes had answered her.

“If you knew that you had done something for me; not a little thing but a great one—­” He paused; and in the silence they heard the sound of Flossie’s feet coming up the stair.  He had only just time to finish his sentence—­“Would it please you or annoy you?”

She answered hurriedly; for as she rose, Flossie was knocking at the door.

“It would please me more than I can say.”

“Then,” he said in a voice that was too low for Flossie to hear, “you shall know it.”

CHAPTER LVI

It was impossible that Rickman’s intimacy with Miss Harden should pass unnoticed by the other boarders.  But it was well understood by Miss Roots, by Flossie and by all of them, that any attentions he paid to her were paid strictly to his editor’s cousin.  And if there was the least little shade of duplicity in this explanation, his conscience held him so far guiltless, seeing that he had adopted it more on Lucia’s account than his own.  Incidentally, however, he was not displeased that it had apparently satisfied Flossie.