“They’re the last you will ever read.”

“Well, it’s something to have written one good sonnet.”

“One swallow doesn’t make a spring.”

“No; but it tells us spring is coming, and the other swallows.”

“There won’t be any other swallows.  All my swallows have flown.”

“Oh, they’ll fly back again, you’ll see, if you wait till next spring.”

“You weren’t serious just now when you asked me if I was a poet. I was serious enough when I said I didn’t know.”

Something passed over Lucia’s face, a ripple of shadow and flame, some moving of the under currents of the soul that told him that he was understood, that something had happened there, something that for the moment permitted him to be personal.

“What made you say so?”

“I can’t tell you.  Not natural modesty.  I’m modest about some things, but not about that.”

“Yet surely you must know?”

“I did yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yesterday—­last night; in fact up to eleven o’clock this morning I firmly believed that I had genius, or something uncommonly like it.  I still believe that I had it.”

He seemed to himself to have become almost grossly personal; but to Lucia he had ceased to be personal at all; he had passed into the region of realities; and in so passing had become intensely interesting.  To Lucia, with the blood of ten generations of scholars in her veins, the question of a man’s talent was supremely important; the man himself might not matter, but his talent mattered very much; to discuss it with him was entirely natural and proper.  So she never once stopped to ask herself why she was standing on Harcombe Hill, holding this really very intimate conversation with Mr. Rickman.

“The things,” he continued, “the things I’ve written prove it.  I can say so without the smallest conceit, because I haven’t it now, and never shall have it again.  I feel as if it had belonged to somebody else.”

Mr. Rickman was losing all likeness to his former self.  He spoke no longer impulsively, but in the steady deliberate tones of unalterable conviction.  And Lucia no longer heard the Cockney accent in this voice that came to her out of a suffering so lucid and so profound.  She forgot that it came from the other side of the social gulf.  If at any point in that conversation she had thought of dismissing him, she could not have dismissed him now.  There was very little use in having saved his neck if she abandoned him to his misery.

Instead of abandoning him she sat down on a rough seat by the roadside to consider Mr. Rickman’s case in all its bearings.  In doing so she found herself for the first time contemplating his personal appearance as such; and that not altogether with disapproval.  Though it was not in the least what she would have expected, he showed to advantage in the open air.  She began to perceive the secret of his extravagant and preposterous charm.  There was something about him—­something that he had no right to have about him, being born a dweller in cities, which none the less he undeniably and inevitably had, something that made him one with this moorland setting, untamed and beautiful and shy.  The great natural features of the landscape did him no wrong; for he was natural too.