“I wish you’d leave it all to me.”

“In that case we should never have finished,” said the lady.

He smiled.  “Perhaps not.  At any rate you’ve worked so hard that I can finish it now by myself.”

She looked round the room.  Undisguised fatigue was in the look.  What they had done was nothing to what they had yet to do.

“You can’t,” she said.

“I can.  Easily.  I miscalculated the time it would take.”

She said nothing, for she knew that he had lied.  His miscalculation was all the other way.  She bent again over her work.  It was all that he could do not to lift her arms gently but firmly from the table, to take away her pen and ink, and put out her lamp.  He would have liked to have done some violence to the catalogue.

“I say, you know, you’ll make yourself ill.  You’re burning the candle at both ends.  May I suggest that the game isn’t worth the candle?”

“Have you very much more to do?”

“About two hours’ work.  Would it be impertinent to say that I could do it better by myself?”

She looked at her watch and ignored his last question.  “You can’t do two hours’ work.  It’s twenty minutes past your time already.”

Past his time, indeed!  As if he hadn’t been working past his time every night since he came.  She had grown mighty particular all of a sudden!

“The presence of these engaging little Elzevirs is a terrible temptation to a second-hand bookseller, still I believe you can trust me with them alone.”

From the expression of her face he gathered that this remark was even more impertinent than the other.  He had meant it to be.

“I really think,” said the lady, “that you had better go.”

“Just as you please; I shall only have to sit up two hours later to-morrow night.”

He walked to his place with his head thrown farther back and his chin thrust farther forward than ever.  He began to sort and arrange his papers preparatory to his departure.  It took him five minutes.  At the end of the five minutes he was aware that Lucia had risen and was bidding him Good-night.

“You were quite right,” she was saying.  “I am tired, and I had better leave off.  If you had rather stay and finish, please stay.”

At those words Mr. Rickman was filled with a monstrous and amazing courage.  He made for the door, crossing without a tremor the whole length of the library.  He reached the door before Miss Harden, and opened it.  He returned her good-night with a hope that she would be rested in the morning.  And as he went back to his solitary labour he smiled softly to himself, a smile of self-congratulation.

He had meant her to go—­and she had gone.

Upstairs in her room overhead Lucia communed with her own face in the glass.

“My private secretary?”

The face in the glass looked dubious.

“Of course I would rather have a gentleman for my private secretary.  Some people would say he isn’t a gentleman.” (She had said it herself the other day.)