16 INVICTUS 20;

that the late Master of Lazarus bought books by the cartload, and was obliged to break through the south wall and sacrifice the west wing (his wife’s boudoir) to make room for them.  But where he looked for some record of these treasures he found nothing but an elaborate description of the Harden arms with all their quarterings.  The historian was not useful for Rickman’s purposes.  He was preoccupied with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of observing that their motto was Invictus.  He certainly seemed to have found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious contortions and prostrations of his spirit.  The poor wretch, in the pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house.  And with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently exhausted itself.  “The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden,” said the chronicler, “has made no addition to the library of his ancestors.”  What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens.  It was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyond drawing attention to the curious fact that no woman had ever been permitted to inherit the Harden Library.  The inspired pen of the chronicler evoked the long procession of those Hardens whose motto was Invictus; crossed-legged crusading Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and never a petticoat among them all.  It was just as well, Rickman reflected, that Poppy’s frivolous little phantom had not danced after him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, had spared it a shadowy smile.

He looked round and realized that his separation from Poppy would be disagreeably prolonged if he was expected to catalogue and arrange all the books in the Harden Library.  Allowing so much time to so much space, (measuring by feet of bookshelf) hours ran rapidly to days, and days to weeks—­why, months might pass and find him still labouring there.  He would be buried in the blackness, forgotten by Poppy and the world.  That was assuming that the Harden Library really belonged to the Hardens.  And if it was to belong to Dicky Pilkington, what on earth had he been sent for?

“You were sent in answer to my letter, I suppose?”

Rickman’s nervous system was still so far under the dominion of Dicky’s champagne that he started violently.  Double doors and double carpets deadened all sound of coming and going, and the voice seemed to have got into the room by itself.  As from its softness he judged it to be still some yards distant, he suffered a further shock on finding a lady standing by his elbow.