“What was he doing there?”

“To the best of my belief, he was starving.  Do you find the room too close?”

“No, no.  Go on.”

Maddox went on.  He was enjoying the sensation he was creating.  He went on happily, piling up the agony.  Since she would have it he was not reticent of detail.  He related the story of the Rankins’ dinner.  He described with diabolically graphic touches the garret in Howland Street.  “We thought he’d been drinking, you know, and all the time he was starving.”

“He was starving—­” she repeated slowly to herself.

“He was not doing it because he was a poet.  It seems he had to pay some debt, or thought he had.  The poor chap talked about it when he was delirious.  Oh—­let me open that window.”

“Thank you.  You say he was delirious.  Were you with him then?”

Maddox leapt to his conclusion.  Miss Lucia Harden had something to conceal.  He gathered it from her sudden change of attitude, from her interrogation, from her faintness and from the throbbing terror in her voice. That was why she desired the suppression of the Sonnets.

“Were you with him?” she repeated.

“No.  God forgive me!”

“Nobody was with him—­before they took him to the hospital?”

“Nobody, my dear lady, whom you would call anybody.  He owes his life to the charity of a drunken prostitute.”

She was woman, the eternal, predestined enemy of Rickman’s genius.  Therefore he had determined not to spare her, but to smite her with words like sledge-hammers.

And to judge by the look of her he had succeeded.  She had turned away from him to the open window.  She made no sign of suffering but for the troubled rising and falling of her breast.  He saw in her a woman mortally smitten, but smitten, he imagined, in her vanity.

“Have I persuaded you,” he said quietly, “to give up those Sonnets?”

“You shall have a copy.  If Mr. Rickman wants the original he must come for it himself.”

“Thanks.”  Maddox had ceased to be truculent, having gained his end.  His blue eyes twinkled with their old infantile devilry.  “Thanks.  It’s awfully nice of you.  But—­couldn’t you make it seem a little more spontaneous?  You see, I don’t want Rickman to know I had to ask you for them.”  He had a dim perception of inconsistency in his judgement of the lady; since all along he had been trusting her generosity to shelter his indiscretion.

Lucia smiled even in her anguish.  “That I can well imagine.  The copy shall be sent to him.”

And Maddox considered himself dismissed.  He wondered why she called him back to ask for the number of that house in Howland Street.

That afternoon she dragged herself there, that she might torture her eyes because they had not seen, and her heart because it had not felt.

CHAPTER LXXVIII