He turned back again.

“Do you really mean it?” said he.

“I’m afraid I do.”

“You mean that you intend to give up reviewing for Metropolis?”

“I mean that after this I can’t have anything more to do with it.”

He means, thought Jewdwine, that he won’t have anything more to do with me.

And Rickman saw that he was understood.  He wondered how Jewdwine would take it.

He took it nobly.  “Well,” he said, “I’m sorry.  But if you must go, you must.  To tell the truth, my dear fellow, at this rate, you know, I couldn’t afford to keep you.  I wish I could.  You are not the only thing I can’t afford.”  He said it with a certain emotion not very successfully concealed beneath his smile.  Rickman was about to go; but he detained him.

“Wait one minute.  Do you mind telling me whether you’ve any regular sources of income besides Metropolis?”

“Well, not at the moment.”

“And supposing—­none arise?”

“I must risk it.”

“You seem to have a positive mania for taking risks.”  Yes, that was Rickman all over, he found a brilliant joy in the excitement; he was in love with danger.

“Oh well, sometimes, you know, you’ve got to take them.”

Happy Rickman!  The things that were so difficult and complicated to Jewdwine were so simple, so incontestable to him.  “Some people, Rickman, would say you were a fool.”  He sighed, and the sigh was a tribute his envy paid to Rickman’s foolishness.  “I won’t offer an opinion; the event will prove.”

“It won’t prove anything.  Events never do.  They merely happen.”

“Well, if they happen wrong, and I can help you, you’ve only got to come to me.”

Never in all his life had Jewdwine so nearly achieved the grace of humility as in this offer of his help.  He would have given anything if Rickman could have accepted it, but refusal was a foregone conclusion.  And yet he offered it.

“Thanks—­thanks awfully.”  It was Rickman who appeared nervous and ashamed.  His mouth twitched; he held out his hand abruptly; he was desperately anxious to say good-night and get it over.  It seemed to him that he had been six years taking leave of Jewdwine; each year had seen the departure of some quality he had known him by.  He wanted to have done with it now for ever.

But Jewdwine would not see his hand.  He turned away; paced the floor; swung back on a hesitating heel and approached him, smiling.

“You’re not going to disappear altogether, are you?  You’ll turn up again, and let me know how you’re getting on?”

To Rickman there was something tragic and retrospective in Jewdwine’s smile.  It had no joy in it, but an appeal, rather, to the memory of what he had been.  He found it irresistible.

“Thanks.  I shall get on all right; but I’ll turn up again sometime.”

Jewdwine’s smile parted with its pathos, its appeal.  It conveyed a promise, an assurance that whatever else had perished in him his friendship was not dead.