d the room with a quick movement of distress and rang the
bell. With horror he perceived her hospitable intention.

She was actually ordering his dinner and his room. He heard every word
of her soft voice; it was saying that he was to have some soup, and
the chicken, and the tart--no, the jelly, and a bottle of burgundy, in
the morning-room. He saw the young footman standing almost on tip-toe,
winged for service, fired with her enthusiasm and her secrecy.

Coming on that sinister and ambiguous errand, how could he sleep under
her roof? How could he eat her chicken, and drink her burgundy, and
sit in her morning-room? And how could he explain that he could not?
Happily she left him to settle the point with the footman.

With surprise and a little concern Lucia Harden learnt that the rather
extraordinary young man, Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, had betaken himself
to an hotel. It appeared, that courteously, but with an earnestness
that admitted of no contradiction, he had declined all hospitality
whatever.

CHAPTER XV

It was Friday morning, and Mr. Rickman lay in bed, outwardly beholding
through the open window the divinity of the sea, inwardly
contemplating the phantoms of the mind. For he judged them to be
phantoms (alcoholic in their origin), his scruples of last night.
Strictly speaking, it was on Wednesday night that he had got drunk;
but he felt as if his intoxication had prolonged itself abnormally, as
if this were the first moment of indubitable sobriety.

And as he lay there, he prepared himself to act the part of the cold,
abstracted, supercilious man of business, the part already too
horribly familiar to him as young Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He
reflected how nearly he had wrecked his prospects in that character.
He bade himself beware of woman and of drink, the two things most
fatal to stability of judgement. He recalled, painfully, the events of
last evening. He was not quite sure what he had done, or hadn't done;
but he believed he had all but flung up the chance of securing for
Rickman's the great Harden Library. And he had quite a vivid and
disturbing recollection of the face, the person that had inspired him
with that impulse of fantastic folly.

In the candid light of morning this view of his conduct presented
itself as the sane thinking of a regenerated intellect. He realized,
as he had not realized before, how colossal was the opportunity he had
so narrowly let slip. The great Harden Libra