“No, Sophie, I didn’t tell him that.”  But Lucy looked a little guilty.  The flute rose as if in passionate protest against her denial.  It seemed to say “You did!  You know you did!”

“I only said it was a pity he’d given it up, and I meant it.  But oh!” and Lucy put her hands up to her ears, “I don’t mean it any more.”

“That comes,” said Rickman, “of taking things on trust.”

She smiled and shook her head.  It was her first approach to a sign of reassurance.

“That’s the sort of thing she’s always doing.  It doesn’t matter for you, Lucy.  You won’t have to stay on and hear him.”

“I don’t know.  I think I shall stay on.  You see, Mr. Rickman, I can’t part with this pretty room.”

“Do you like it?”

“I like it very much indeed.  You’re all coming to dine with me here again some day.”

“And you must come and dine with us, Miss Harden, when we’ve got settled.”  It was Flossie who spoke.

“I shall be delighted.”

He looked up, surprised.  He could not have believed the Beaver could have done it so prettily.  He had not even realized that it could be done at all.  It never occurred to him that his marriage could bring him nearer to Lucia Harden.  He looked kindly at the Beaver and blessed her for that thought.  And then a thought bolder than the Beaver’s came to him.  “I hope,” he said, “you’ll do more than that.  You must come and stay with us in the summer.  You shall sit out in a deck-chair in the garden all day.  That’s the way to get strong.”

Then he remembered that she could do that just as well in someone else’s garden up at Hampstead, and he looked shy and anxious as he added, “Will you come?”

“Of course I’ll come,” said she.

He saw her going through the house at Ealing and sitting in the little green garden with the lilac bushes about her all in flower.  And at the thought of her coming he was profoundly moved.  His eyes moistened, and under the table his knees shook violently with the agitation of his nerves.  Miss Roots gave one queer little glance at him and another at Flossie, and the moment passed.

And Lucia had not divined it.  No, not for a moment, not even in the moment of leave-taking.  She was still holding Flossie’s hand in hers when her eyes met his, kind eyes that were still saying almost triumphantly, “I told you so.”

As she dropped Flossie’s hand for his, she answered the question that he had not dared to ask.  “I’ve read them,” she said, and there was no diminution in her glad look.

“When may I see you?”

“To-morrow, can you?  Any time after four?”

CHAPTER LXI

He came into Lucia’s presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself.  And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.