They talked no more that evening.

CHAPTER XVI

At seven he again refused Miss Harden’s hospitality and withdrew to his hotel.  He was to return before nine to let her know his decision, and as yet he had done nothing towards thinking it out.

A letter had come for him by the evening post.  It had been forwarded from his rooms and ran thus.

     “My dear Rickets: 

     “I haven’t forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn
     up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne. 
     It’s going to be awfully select.

     “Ever your own and nobody else’s,

     “Poppy Grace.

     “P.S.—­How is your poor head?”

There are many ways of being kind and that was Poppy’s way.  She wanted to tell him not to be cut up about Wednesday night; that, whatever Dicky Pilkington thought of his pretensions, she still reckoned him in the number of the awfully select.  And lest he should have deeper grounds for uneasiness her postscript hinted in the most delicate manner possible that she had not taken him seriously, attributing his utterances to their true cause.  And yet she was his own and nobody else’s.  She was a good sort, Poppy, taking her all round.

He tried to think about Poppy and found it difficult.  His mind wandered; not into the realms of fancy, but into paths strange and humiliating for a scholar and a poet.  He caught himself murmuring, “Harmouth—­Harcombe—­Homer—­Harden.”  He had got them all right.  He never dreamed of—­of dropping them when he wasn’t excited.  It was only in the beaten tracks where his father had gone before him that he was apt to slide.  He was triumphant over Harmouth where he might have tripped over Hammersmith.  Homer and Hesiod were as safe with him as with Horace Jewdwine. (He couldn’t think how he had managed to come to grief over Homer just now.  It was nerves, or luck, or pure accident, the sort of thing that might have happened to anybody.) Thank Heaven, his tongue was almost virgin to the aitch in Harden.

Harden—­Lucia Harden.  He knew her name and how to pronounce it; for he had seen it written in the fly-leaf of a book, and heard it spoken by the footman who called her Miss Loocher.  This he took to be a corruption of the Italian form.

Here he again tried to evoke a vivid image of Poppy; but without success.  And then he remembered that he had still to think it out.

First of all, then, he would eliminate sentiment.  Sentiment apart, he was by no means sure that he would do well to act on the impulse of the morning and decamp.  After all, what was he sure of?  Was he sure that Sir Frederick Harden’s affairs, including his library, were involved beyond redemption?  Put it that there was an off-chance of Sir Frederick’s financial recovery.