But the terrible thing had to be done.  She had got to return the manuscript, the gift that should never have been given.  She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from.  He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.

“You must take them back,” she said.  “I can’t keep them—­or—­or have anything to do with them after what you told me.  I should feel as if I’d taken what belonged to some one else.”

As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.

But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth.  So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood.  “And yet,” he murmured, “you say it isn’t true.”

She did not contradict him this time.  And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.

BOOK IV

THE MAN HIMSELF

CHAPTER LXII

After all, the wedding did not take place on the twenty-fifth; for on the twentieth Keith was summoned to Ilford by a letter from his stepmother.  Mrs. Rickman said she thought he ought to know (as if Keith were seeking to avoid the knowledge!) that his father had had a slight paralytic seizure.  He had recovered, but it had left him very unsettled and depressed.  He kept on for ever worrying to see Keith.  Mrs. Rickman hoped (not without a touch of asperity) that Keith would lose no time in coming, as his father seemed so uneasy in his mind.

Very uneasy in his mind was Isaac, as upstairs in the big front bedroom, (which from its excess of glass and mahogany bore a curious resemblance to the front shop,) he lay, a strangely shrunken figure in the great bed.  His face, once so reticent and regular, was drawn on one side, twisted into an oblique expression of abandonment and agony.

Keith was not prepared for the change; and he broke down completely as the poor right hand (which Isaac would use) opened and closed in a vain effort to clasp his.  But Isaac was intolerant of sympathy, and at once rebuked all reference to his illness.  Above the wreck of his austere face, his eyes, blood-shot as they were and hooded under their slack lids, defied you to notice any change in him.

“I sent for you,” he said, “because I wanted to talk over a little business.”  His utterance was thick and uncertain; the act of speech showed the swollen tongue struggling in the distorted mouth.

“Oh, don’t bother about business now, father,” said Keith, trying hard to steady his voice.

His father gave an irritable glance, as if he were repelling an accusation of mortality, conveyed in the word “now.”

“And why not now as well as any other time?”

Keith blew his nose hard and turned away.