was to propitiate the grim grizzled
fellow, so like a Methodist parson, who glared at them from the
counter.

They kept their discovery to themselves, as if it had been something
too precious to be handled, as if its charm, the poetry, the pathos of
it must escape under discussion. But any of them who did compare notes
agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too
big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for
the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being
the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with
lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor
fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt--no--no, he
skipped--his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it
terrible that it should happen at all--to him. They touched it
tenderly; if it was not exactly part of his poetry it was part of his
pathos. The shop was responsible for it. He ought never, never to have
been there.

And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained
by what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he
should not know.

He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of
everything, his great classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, was lying
finished in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the
last month those very modern poems that he called _Saturnalia_ had
been careering through the columns of _The Planet_. But at the moment
he was mainly supported by the coming of Easter.

CHAPTER III

The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and
well-appointed. But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the
dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a
boy. There was something soothing in its very obscurity and
retirement. He could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully
reading his Homer. In that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms
were dimmed with familiarity and dirt. His dreams took shape before
him, they came and went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision
with reality. There was hardly any part of it that was not consecrated
by some divine visitation. It was in the corner by the window,
standing on a step-ladder and fumbling in the darkness for a copy of
Demosthenes, _De Corona_, that he lit on his first Idea. From his seat
behind the counter, staring, as was his custom, into the recess where
the