d
not have found a better man.

CHAPTER XX

It was Easter Sunday and Lucia's heart was glad, for she had had a
letter from her father. There never was such a father and there never
were such letters as, once in a blue moon and when the fancy seized
him, he wrote to his adorable Lucy. Generally speaking they were all
about himself and his fiddle, the fiddle that when he was at home he
played from morning to night. But this letter was more exciting. It
was full of all the foolish and delightful things they were to do
together in Cannes, in Venice and in Florence and in Rome. He was
always in one or other of these places, but this was the first time he
had proposed that his adorable Lucy should join him. "You're too young
to see the world," he used to say. "You wouldn't enjoy it, Lucy, you
really wouldn't. The world is simply wasted on any woman under five
and thirty." Lucia was not quite five and twenty. She was not very
strong, and she felt that if she didn't see the world soon she might
not enjoy it very much when she did see it. And it was barely a month
now till the twenty-seventh.

Lucia went singing downstairs and into the library to throw all its
four windows open to the delicious spring, and there, to her amazement
(for it was Sunday), she came upon Mr. Rickman cataloguing hard.

She felt a little pang of self-reproach at the sight of him. There was
something pathetic in his attitude, in his bowed head and spread
elbows, the whole assiduous and devoted figure. How hard he was
working, with what a surprising speed in his slender nervous hands.
She had not meant him to give up the whole of his three days' holiday
to her, and she really could not take his Easter Sunday, poor little
man. So, with that courtesy which was Mr. Rickman's admiration and
despair, she insisted on restoring it to him, and earnestly advised
his spending it in the open air. In the evening he could have the
library to himself, to read or write or rest in; he would, she
thought, be more comfortable there than in the inn. Mr. Rickman
admitted that he would like to have a walk to stretch his legs a bit,
and as she opened the south window she had a back view of him
stretching them across the lawn. He walked as rapidly as he wrote,
holding his head very high in the air. He wore a light grey suit and a
new straw hat with a dull olive green ribbon on it, poor dear. She was
glad that it was a fine day for the hat.

She watched him till th