So Maddox prayed to heaven for promotion, that he might make Rickman independent of Jewdwine and his journal.  There were many things that he had in his mind to do for him in the day of advancement.  His eyes raked the horizon, sighting promotion from afar.  And in the last two years, promotion had come very near to Maddox.  There were quarters, influential quarters, where he Was spoken of as a singularly original young man; and he had the knack of getting hold of singularly original young men; young men of originality too singular perhaps to make the paper pay.  Still, though the orbit of The Planet was hardly so vast as Maddox had anticipated, as to its brilliance there could be no two opinions.  In the year ninety-eight, the year that saw Rickman first struggling in the financier’s toils, Maddox had delivered his paper from the power of Pilkington.  Promotion played with Maddox; it hovered round him, touching him tentatively with the tips of its wings; he lured it by every innocent art within his power, but hitherto it had always settled on some less wild and wanton head.

At last it came, it kept on coming, from a quarter where, as he had every right to look for it, he had of course never dreamed of looking.  Rankin’s publishers, grown rich on the proceeds of Rankin’s pen, were dissatisfied with their reader (the poor man had not discovered Rankin); on Rankin’s advice they offered his post to Maddox (who had), and that at double his salary.  They grew richer, and at a further hint from Rankin they made Maddox a director.  In the same mad year they started a new monthly, and (Rankin again) appointed Maddox as their editor.

His opportunity had come.  On the very night of this third appointment Maddox called on Rickman and proposed on behalf of Rankin and Stables to hand over to him the editorship of The Planet.  For Stables, he said, was too dog lazy, and Rankin too grossly prosperous to have anything to do with it.  He didn’t think any of them would ever make a fortune out of it; but its editor’s income would be at any rate secure.  He omitted to mention that it would be practically secured out of his, Maddox’s, own pocket.

“You may reckon,” said he, “on three hundred and fifty.”  He named the sum modestly, humbly almost; not that he thought Rickman would be sorry to have that little addition to his income, but because he was always diffident in offering anything to Rickman, “when you thought of what he was”; and he found something startling, not to say upsetting, in the joy that leapt up in his young eyes.  You never could tell how Ricky-ticky would take a thing; but if he had known he was going to take it that way he would have written him a note.  He wondered whether Ricky-ticky was in a tight corner, head over ears in debt or love.  Did the young lunatic want to marry after that near shave he had two years ago?  You wouldn’t exactly refuse three hundred and fifty; but a beggar must be brought pretty low to be crumpled up in that way by the mere mention of the sum.