At last it ended.  Lucia was in the doorway.  At the sight of her his body shook and the strength in his limbs seemed to dissolve and flow downwards to the floor.  His eyes never left her as she came to him with her rhythmic unembarrassed motion.  She greeted him as if they had met the other day; but as she took his hand she looked down at it, startled by its slenderness.  He was glad that she seated herself on his right, for he felt that the violence of his heart must be audible through his emaciated ribs.

Kitty made some trivial remark, and Lucia turned to her as if her whole soul hung upon Kitty’s words.  Her absorption gave him time to recover himself. (It did not occur to him that that was what she had turned away for.) Her turning enabled him to look at her.  He noticed that she seemed in better health than when he had seen her last, and that in sign of it her beauty was stronger, more vivid and more defined.

They said little to each other.  But when Kitty had left them they drew in their chairs to the hearth with something of the glad consent of those for whom the long-desired moment has arrived.  He felt that old sense of annihilated time, of return to a state that had never really lapsed; and it struck him that she, too, had that feeling.  It was she who spoke first.

“Before you begin your business, tell me about yourself.”

“There isn’t anything to tell.”

She looked as if she rather doubted the truth of that statement.

“If you don’t mind, I’d rather begin about the business and get it over.”

“Why, is it—­is it at all unpleasant?”

He smiled.  “Not in the least, not in the very least.  It’s about the library.”

“I thought we’d agreed that that was all over and done with long ago?”

“Well, you see, it hasn’t anything to do with us.  My father—­”

“Don’t let us go back to that.”

“I’m sorry, but we must—­a little.  You know my father and I had a difference of opinion?”

“I know—­I know.”

“Well, in the end he owned that I was right.  That was when he was dying.”

He wished she would not look at him; for he could not look at her.  He was endeavouring to make his tale appear in the last degree natural and convincing.  Up till now he had told nothing but the truth, but as he was about to enter on the path of perjury he became embarrassed by the intentness of her gaze.

“You were with him?” she asked.

“Yes.”  He paused a moment to command a superior kind of calm.  That pause wrecked him, for it gave her also time for thought.  “He wanted either to pay you the money that you should have had, or to hand over the library; and I thought—­”

“But the library was sold?”

He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.

“Then how,” she asked, “was the library redeemed?”