Each of those six days was like a Sunday, and Sunday to Rickman was always a day of beatitude, being the day of dreams.  And she, in her sweet unfamiliar beauty, only half real, though so piercingly present to him, was an incarnate dream.  She always sat with her back to the south window, so that her head and shoulders appeared somewhat indistinct against the outer world, a background of flower-beds and green grass and sky, covered with the criss-cross of the leaded lozenge panes and the watery shimmer of the glass.  The outline of her head was indicated by a little line of light that threaded her hair and tipped the curve of her small ears.  He knew every change of her face, from its serene, faint-tinted morning look, to its flower-like pallor in the dusk.  He knew only too well its look under the lamp-light after a hard day’s work; the look that came with a slight blurring of its soft contours, and a drooping of tired eyelids over pathetic eyes.  He saw what Jewdwine had failed to see, that Lucia was not strong.

Six days, and three days before that, nine days in all; and it was as if he had known that face all his life; he could not conceive a time when he had not known it.  As for the things he had known, horrible, curious and incredible things, such as Rickman’s, Mrs. Downey’s, St. Pancras Church, and the editor of The Museion (whose last letter he had left unanswered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and unimaginable past.  It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden.  He was never very far from her.  The east window looked across the courtyard to the window of her drawing-room; he could see her there, sitting in the lamp-light; he could hear the music that she made.  Her bedroom was above the library; it was pleasant to him to know that when she left him it was to sleep there overhead.  The deep quiet of his passion had drawn him again into his dream.

And then all of a sudden, he woke up and broke the silence.  It was ten o’clock on Saturday evening.  Lucia had shifted the shade of the lamp.  From where he sat her face was in twilight and her body in darkness.  He had got up to put a book into its place, when he saw her leaning back and covering her eyes with her hand.

The sight was too much for him.  He came up and stood beside her.

“Miss Harden, I don’t like this.  I—­I can’t stand it any longer.”

She looked up.  She had been unaware of Mr. Rickman for the last hour, and certainly did not expect to find him there.

“What is it that you can’t stand?”

“To see you working from morning to night.  It—­it isn’t right, you know.  You’re paying me for this, and doing the half of it yourself.”

“I’m not doing a quarter of it.  You forget that you’re working three times as fast as I can.”

“And you forget that you’re working three times as hard.”

“No.  I’m leaving the hard work to you.”