generalities in a
guarded manner. He was kept very busy, and was as yet unable to send
him any more detailed information. He had begun to feel it strange
that these questions should be put, to marvel at the assumption that
they could in any way concern him. Rickman's had ceased altogether to
exist for him.

He was beginning to lose all sense of strangeness in his position. The
six days might have been six years and Court House the home of his
infancy, Lucia's presence filled it with so warm an atmosphere of
kindness and of love. The very servants had learnt something of her
gentle, considerate ways. He was at home there as he had never been at
home before. He knew every aspect of the library, through all the
changes of the light, from the first waking of its blues and crimsons
in the early morning to the broad and golden sweep of noonday through
the south window; from the quick rushing flame of the sunset to its
premature death among the rafters. Then the lamps; a little light in
the centre where they sat, and the thick enclosing darkness round
about them.

Each of those six days was like a Sunday, and Sunday to Rickman was
always a day of beatitude, being the day of dreams. And she, in her
sweet unfamiliar beauty, only half real, though so piercingly present
to him, was an incarnate dream. She always sat with her back to the
south window, so that her head and shoulders appeared somewhat
indistinct against the outer world, a background of flower-beds and
green grass and sky, covered with the criss-cross of the leaded
lozenge panes and the watery shimmer of the glass. The outline of her
head was indicated by a little line of light that threaded her hair
and tipped the curve of her small ears. He knew every change of her
face, from its serene, faint-tinted morning look, to its flower-like
pallor in the dusk. He knew only too well its look under the
lamp-light after a hard day's work; the look that came with a slight
blurring of its soft contours, and a drooping of tired eyelids over
pathetic eyes. He saw what Jewdwine had failed to see, that Lucia was
not strong.

Six days, and three days before that, nine days in all; and it was as
if he had known that face all his life; he could not conceive a time
when he had not known it. As for the things he had known, horrible,
curious and incredible things, such as Rickman's, Mrs. Downey's, St.
Pancras Church, and the editor of _The Museion_ (whose last letter he
had left unan