ke Jewdwine drew his shawl up about his waist, thus
delicately drawing attention to his enfeebled state. The gesture
seemed to convict Rickman of taking advantage not only of his phrase
but of his influenza, behaviour superlatively base.

"I can give you a perfectly clear statement of the case. You carefully
suppressed _my_ friend and you boomed your own for all you were worth.
Naturally, I reversed your judgment. Of course, if you had told me you
wanted to do a little log-rolling on your own account, I should have
been only too delighted--but I always understood that you disapproved
of the practice."

"So I do. Paterson isn't a friend of mine."

"He's your friend's friend then. I think Mr. Maddox might have been
left to look after his own man."

Rickman rose hastily, as if he were no longer able to sit still and
bear it.

"Jewdwine," he said, and his voice had the vibration which the master
had once found so irresistible. "Have you read young Paterson's
poems?"

"Yes. I've read them."

"And what is your honest--your private opinion of them?"

"I'm not a fool, Rickman. My private opinion of them is the same as
yours."

"What an admission!"

"But," said Jewdwine suavely, "that's not the sort of opinion my
public--the public that pays for _Metropolis_--pays to have."

"You mean it's the sort of opinion I'm paid to give."

"Well, broadly speaking--of course there are exceptions, and Paterson
in other circumstances might have been one of them--that's very much
what I do mean."

"Then--I'm awfully sorry, Jewdwine--but if that's so I can't go on
working for _Metropolis_. I must give it up. In fact, that's really
what I came to say."

Jewdwine too had risen with an air of relief, being anxious to end an
interview which was becoming more uncomfortable than he cared for. He
had stood, gazing under drooping eyelids at his disciple's feet.
Nobody would have been more surprised than Jewdwine if you had
suggested to him that he could have any feeling about looking anybody
in the face. But at that last incredible, impossible speech of his he
raised his eyes and fixed them on Rickman's for a moment.

In that moment many things were revealed to him.

He turned and stood with his back to Rickman, staring through the open
window. All that he saw there, the quiet walled garden, the rows of
elms on the terrace beside it, the dim green of the Heath, and the
steep unscaleable grey blue barrier of the sky, had taken on a