This morning, however, he was thinking of him, as it happened.  And when the old man saw him up there, holding his poor bursting head in his hands, and said:  “‘Ead achin’ my boy, again?  That comes of studyin’ too ’ard!” he thought with a touch of compunction, “What would he say if he knew I’d gone drunk to bed last night?  And if he knew about Poppy?”

Isaac approached his son gingerly and with a certain fear.  The only thing he had discovered about this admirable machine of his was that it went better when you left it alone.  It had not been going quite so well lately though, and this morning it seemed decidedly out of order.  He took a seat at the table and busied himself with a catalogue.  Presently he rose and touched the boy gently on the shoulder.

“Come into the office a minute, will you?” he said, with a glance at the cashier.  And Keith, wondering what on earth he wanted with him, followed into a recess shut on from the shop by a plate-glass and mahogany screen.  Isaac hunted among the papers on his writing-table for a letter he could not find.

“You remember your old friend, Sir Joseph Harden, don’t you?”

“Yes.”  Keith was in fact devoted to Sir Joseph’s memory.  He had often wondered what it was, that mysterious “something” which Sir Joseph would have done for him, if he had lived, and whether, if he had done it, it would have made a difference.

“Well, I got a letter from his place in Devonshire this morning.  They’ve asked me to send them some one down to catalogue his library.  They want an expert, and he must go at once and finish by the twenty-seventh, or it’s no use.  Dear me, where is that letter?”

Keith goaded his brain to an agonizing activity.  It seemed to him that some such proposal had been made to him before.  But where or when he couldn’t for the life of him remember.

“Pilkington says he told you something about it, last night.  I’ve heard from him this morning, too.”

Pilkington—­he remembered now.  Dicky had bothered him about a library last night; and he had wished Dicky at the devil.  He beat his brains till he struck from them an illuminating flash (Lord, how it hurt too!).

“He didn’t say it was the Harden Library.”

“It is, though.”  Isaac’s coarse forehead flushed with triumph.  “He’s promised me the refusal of it when it comes into the market.”

At any other time Keith would have been interested; but his head ached too much now.  Still he was not too far gone to recognize the magnitude of the affair.

“You’ll have to go down and look at it,” continued Isaac persuasively, “and here’s the opportunity.  You go on their business, and do mine at the same time, and get well paid for it, too.”

“I don’t quite like going that way.  If the thing’s got to be sold why do they want it catalogued?”

“That’s their business, not mine.”

“It looks like ‘their’ mistake, whoever they are.  Where’s the letter?”