There had been, he admitted, an understanding between him and Miss Harden.  It hardly amounted to an engagement; and it had been cancelled on the score of health.

“Of her health?”

The compression of Jewdwine’s lips intimated that the great poet had sinned (not for the first time) against convention.

“She is ill, then?”

“I said on the score of health.  We’re first cousins, and it is not always considered advisable—­”

“I see.  Then that’s all over.”

“At any rate I’m not going to take any risks.”

Rickman pondered that saying for a while.  “Do you mean you’re not going to let her take any risks?”

Jewdwine said nothing, but endeavoured to express by his manner a certain distaste for the conversation.

("Or does he mean,” thought Rickman, “that he won’t risk having a delicate wife on his hands?”)

“It’s not as if I didn’t know,” he persisted, “I know she—­she lies on her back and can’t move.  Is it her spine?”

“No.”

“Or her heart?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Is it something worse?”

Jewdwine was silent.

And in the silence Rickman’s mind wandered free among all imaginable horrors and forebodings.  At last, out of the silence, there appeared to him one more terrible than the rest.  He saw what Jewdwine must have meant.  He gathered it, not from anything he had said, but from what he refused to say, from the sternness of his face, from his hesitations, his reserves.  Jewdwine had created the horror for him as vividly as if he had shaped it into words.

“You needn’t tell me what it is.  Do you mind telling me whether it’s curable or not?”

“My dear Rickman, if I knew why you are asking all these questions—­”

“They must seem extraordinary.  And my reason for asking them is more extraordinary still.”

They measured each other with their eyes.  “Then, I think,” said Jewdwine quietly, “I must ask you for your reason.”

“The reason is that if you’re not going to marry her I am.”

“That,” said Jewdwine, “is by no means certain.  There is not a single member of her family living except my sister and myself.  Therefore I consider myself responsible.  If I were her father or her brother I would not give my consent to her marrying, and I don’t give it now.”

“Oh.  And why not?”

“For many reasons.  Those that applied in my own case are sufficient.”

“You only said there was a risk, and that you weren’t going to take it.  Now I mean to take it.  You see, those fools of doctors may be mistaken.  But whether they’re mistaken or not, I shall marry her just the same.”

“The risk, you see, involves her happiness; and judging by what I know of your temperament—­”

“What do you know about my temperament?”

“You know perfectly well what I know about it.”