She rested in her room that afternoon and Kitty sat with her.  Kitty could not stand, she said, more than a certain amount of Horace Jewdwine.

“Lucia,” she asked suddenly, “if Horace Jewdwine had asked you to marry him five years ago, would you have had him?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t really know.  He’s a good man.”

“You mean his morals are irreproachable.  It’s quite easy to have irreproachable morals if you have the temperament of an iceberg that has never broken loose from its Pole.  Now I call Keith Rickman a saint, because he could so easily have been the other thing.”

Lucia did not respond; and Kitty left her.

Kitty’s question had set her thinking.  Would she have married Horace if he had asked her five years ago?  Why not?  Between Horace and her there was the bond of kindred and of caste.  He was a scholar; he had, or he once had, a beautiful mind full of noble thoughts of the kind she most admired.  With Horace she would have felt safe from many things.  All his ideas and feelings, all his movements could be relied on with an absolute assurance of their propriety.  Horace would never do or say anything that could offend her feminine taste.  In his love (she had been certain) there would never be anything painful, passionate, disturbing.  She had dreamed of a love which should be a great calm light rather than a flame.  There was no sort of flame about Horace. Was Horace a good man?  Yes.  That is to say he was a moral man.  He would have come to her clean in body and in soul.  She had vowed she would never marry a certain kind of man.  And yet that was the kind of man Keith Rickman had been.

She had further demanded in her husband the finish of the ages.  Who was more finished than Horace?  Who more consummately, irreproachably refined?  And yet her heart had grown more tender over Keith Rickman and his solecisms.  And now it beat faster at the very thought of him, after Horace Jewdwine.

For Horace’s coming had brought her understanding of Keith Rickman and herself.  She knew now what had troubled her once clear vision of him.  It was when she had loved him least that she had divined him best.  Hers was not the facile heart that believes because it desires.  It desired because it believed; and now it doubted because its belief was set so high.

And, knowing that she loved him, she thought of that last day when he had left her, and how he had taken her hands in his and looked at them, and she remembered and wondered and had hope.

Then it occurred to her that Horace would be leaving early the next morning, and that she really ought to go down to the drawing-room and talk to him.

Again by Kitty’s mercy he had been given another chance.  He was softened by a mood of valediction mingled with remorse.  He was even inclined to be a little sentimental.  Lucia, because her vision was indifferent therefore untroubled, could not but perceive the change in him.  His manner had in it something of benediction and something of entreaty; his spirit brooded over, caressed and flattered hers.  He deplored the necessity for his departure. “Et ego in Arcadia”—­he quoted.