ome to tell her so.

Miss Harden received the announcement as if it had been a foregone
conclusion.

"It is settled, then?" said she, "you will have no more scruples?"

"None."

"There's only one thing. I must ask you not to give anybody any
information about the library. We don't want to be bothered with
dealers and collectors. Some of the books are so valuable that we
should never have any peace if their whereabouts became known. Can you
keep the secret?"

His heart sank as he remembered the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan
Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde. But he pledged
himself to absolute discretion, an inviolable secrecy. Why not? He was
a dealer himself and obviously it was his interest to keep other
dealers in the dark. It was an entirely sensible and business-like
pledge. And yet in giving it he felt that he was committing himself to
something unique, something profound, and intimate and irrevocable. He
had burnt his ships, severed himself body and soul from Rickman's. If
it were Miss Harden's interest that he should defend that secret from
his own father, he would have to defend it. He had given his word; and
for the life of him he could not tell why.

In the same way he felt that in spite of his many ingenious arguments
his determination to stay had in it something mysterious and
unforeseen. He had said to her, "Your character may be my destiny."
And perhaps it was. He felt that tremendous issues hung upon his
decision, and that all along he had been forced into it somehow from
outside himself, rather than from within. And yet, as he sat there
feeling all this, while he worked at the abominable catalogue
_raisonne_, he decided further that he would not go away at all.

He would not go back to town to-morrow. He could not afford the time.
He must and would finish that catalogue _raisonne_ by the
twenty-seventh. He had as good as pledged his word to Miss Harden.
Supposing the pledge had a purely ideal, even fantastic value, he was
none the less bound by it, in fact considerably more. For he and she
could only meet in an ideal and fantastic region, and he served her in
an ideal and fantastic capacity, on the wholly ideal and fantastic
assumption that the library was hers. Such a pledge would, he
imagined, be held supreme in the world where honour and Miss Harden
met face to face. And on him it was conceivably more binding than the
promise to take Flossie to the Hippodrome on Saturday, or