? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."

She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was
trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.

"Where is he, Horace?"

"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a
success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was
something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did
not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One
moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner
shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his
conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the
possibility of the great poet's material success.

"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining
here on the tenth."

Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his
pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted
in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality,
perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part
she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His
immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity--no. It rose up
before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her
memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in
attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach
none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that
dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the
spectacle of Horace's abasement.

Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal;
and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether
he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love
should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his
old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the
proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama."
There the author of the _Prolegomena to AEsthetics_, the apostle of the
Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He
touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and
declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what
we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he
flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call
himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been hi