If it came to that, what was he there for?  It was so incredible that he should be there at all.  And yet there he was going to stay, for three weeks, and more.  He had come to tell her so.

Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone conclusion.

“It is settled, then?” said she, “you will have no more scruples?”

“None.”

“There’s only one thing.  I must ask you not to give anybody any information about the library.  We don’t want to be bothered with dealers and collectors.  Some of the books are so valuable that we should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known.  Can you keep the secret?”

His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde.  But he pledged himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy.  Why not?  He was a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other dealers in the dark.  It was an entirely sensible and business-like pledge.  And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable.  He had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman’s.  If it were Miss Harden’s interest that he should defend that secret from his own father, he would have to defend it.  He had given his word; and for the life of him he could not tell why.

In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and unforeseen.  He had said to her, “Your character may be my destiny.”  And perhaps it was.  He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from outside himself, rather than from within.  And yet, as he sat there feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogue raisonne, he decided further that he would not go away at all.

He would not go back to town to-morrow.  He could not afford the time.  He must and would finish that catalogue raisonne by the twenty-seventh.  He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden.  Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more.  For he and she could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic assumption that the library was hers.  Such a pledge would, he imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden met face to face.  And on him it was conceivably more binding than the promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or to intoxicate himself on Sunday with champagne in the society of Miss Poppy Grace.  Its sovereignty cancelled the priority of the more trivial and the grosser claim.  His word to Miss Harden was one of those fine immortal things that can only be redeemed at the cost of the actual.  To redeem it he was prepared for sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the great three days.