Whatever he had thought of himself at four o’clock in the morning, by four o’clock in the afternoon Jewdwine took an extremely lenient, not to say favourable view.  Unfortunately he had not the courage of that opinion either.  Therefore he was profoundly touched by this final instance of Rickman’s devotion, and all that it argued of reckless and inspired belief.  In the six months that followed he saw more of Rickman than he had seen in as many years.  Whenever he had a slack evening he would ask him to dinner, and let him sit talking on far into the night.  He was afraid of being left alone with that uncomfortable doubt, that torturing suspicion.  Rickman brought with him an atmosphere charged with stimulating conviction, and in his presence Jewdwine breathed freely and unafraid.  He felt himself no longer the ambiguous Jewdwine that he was, but the noble incorruptible Jewdwine that he had been.  Up there in the privacy of his study Jewdwine let himself go; to that listener he was free to speak as a critic noble and incorruptible.  But there were moments, painful for both men, when he would pause, gripped by his doubt, in the full swing of some high deliverance; when he looked at Rickman with a pathetic anxious gaze, as if uncertain whether he were not presuming too far on a character that he held only at the mercy of his friend’s belief.

Though as yet he was not fully aware of the extent to which he relied on that belief, there could hardly have been a stronger tie than that which now bound him to his subordinate.  He would have shrunk from loosing it lest he should cut himself off from some pure source of immortality, lest he should break the last link between his soul and the sustaining and divine reality.  It was as if through Rickman he remained attached to the beauty which he still loved and to the truth which he still darkly discerned.

In any case he could not have suffered him to go unrewarded.  He owed that to himself, to the queer personal decency which he still managed to preserve after all his flounderings in the slough of journalism.  It was intolerable to his pride that Rickman should be in any pecuniary embarrassment through his uncompromising devotion.  He hardly knew whether he was the more pleased because Rickman had stuck to him or because he had thrown his other friends over.  He had never quite forgiven him that divided fealty.  He cared nothing for an allegiance that he had had to share with Maddox and his gang.  But now that Rickman was once more exclusively, indisputably his, he was in honour bound to cherish and protect him. (Jewdwine was frequently visited by these wakenings of the feudal instinct that slept secretly in his blood.) If he could not make up to Rickman for the loss of the proposed editorship, he saw to it that he was kept well supplied with lucrative work on his own paper.  As an even stronger proof of his esteem he allowed him for the first time a certain authority, and an unfettered hand.