“That’s rather dreadful; I wish you hadn’t.”

“Oh, no, you don’t.  It’s not the human voice you draw the line at—­it’s the Cockney accent.”

Lucia’s smile flickered and went out, extinguished by the waves of her blush.  She was not prepared to have her thoughts read—­and read aloud to her—­in this way; and that particular thought was one she would have preferred him not to read.

“I daresay Keats had a Cockney accent, if we did but know; and I daresay a good many people never heard anything else.”

“I’m afraid you’d have heard it yourself, Miss Harden, if you’d met him.”

“Possibly.  It isn’t what I should have remembered him by, though.  That reminds me.  I came upon a poem—­a sonnet—­of yours—­if it was yours—­this morning.  It was lying on the library floor.  You will find it under the bronze Pallas on the table.”

Mr. Rickman stooped, picked up a sod and examined it carefully.

“Thank you very much.  It was mine.  I was afraid it was lost.”

“It would have been a great pity if it had been.”

Mr. Rickman dropped his sod.

She answered the question that appeared in his eyes, though not on his tongue.  “Yes, I read it.  It was printed, you see.  I read it before I could make up my mind whether I might or not.”

“It was all right.  But I wish you hadn’t.”

To look at Mr. Rickman you would have said that all his mind was concentrated on the heel of his boot, as it slowly but savagely ground the sod to dust.  Even so, the action seemed to say, even so could he have destroyed that sonnet.

“What did you think of it?”

He had looked up, when she least expected, with his disarming and ingenuous smile.  Lucia felt that he had laid an ambush for her by his abstraction; the question and the smile shot, flashed, out of it with a directness that made subterfuge impossible.

The seriousness of the question was what made it so awkward for a lady with the pleasure-giving instinct.  If Mr. Rickman had merely asked her if she liked his new straw hat with the olive green ribbon (supposing them to be on terms that made such a question possible) she would probably have said “Yes,” whether she liked it or not; because she wanted to give pleasure, because she didn’t care a straw about his straw hat.  But when Mr. Rickman asked her how she liked his sonnet, he was talking about the things that really mattered; and in the things that really mattered Lucia was sincerity itself.

“I thought,” said she, “I thought the first dozen lines extremely beautiful.”

“In a sonnet every line should be beautiful—­should be perfect.”

“Oh—­if you’re aiming at perfection.”

“Why, what else in Heaven’s name should I aim at?”

Lucia was silent; and he mistook her silence for distrust.

“I don’t want you to judge me by that sonnet.”

“But I shouldn’t dream of judging you by that sonnet, any more than I should judge that sonnet by its last two lines.  They’re not the last you’ll ever write.”