swered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and
unimaginable past. It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing
that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden. He was never
very far from her. The east window looked across the courtyard to the
window of her drawing-room; he could see her there, sitting in the
lamp-light; he could hear the music that she made. Her bedroom was
above the library; it was pleasant to him to know that when she left
him it was to sleep there overhead. The deep quiet of his passion had
drawn him again into his dream.

And then all of a sudden, he woke up and broke the silence. It was ten
o'clock on Saturday evening. Lucia had shifted the shade of the lamp.
From where he sat her face was in twilight and her body in darkness.
He had got up to put a book into its place, when he saw her leaning
back and covering her eyes with her hand.

The sight was too much for him. He came up and stood beside her.

"Miss Harden, I don't like this. I--I can't stand it any longer."

She looked up. She had been unaware of Mr. Rickman for the last hour,
and certainly did not expect to find him there.

"What is it that you can't stand?"

"To see you working from morning to night. It--it isn't right, you
know. You're paying me for this, and doing the half of it yourself."

"I'm not doing a quarter of it. You forget that you're working three
times as fast as I can."

"And you forget that you're working three times as hard."

"No. I'm leaving the hard work to you."

"I wish you'd leave it all to me."

"In that case we should never have finished," said the lady.

He smiled. "Perhaps not. At any rate you've worked so hard that I can
finish it now by myself."

She looked round the room. Undisguised fatigue was in the look. What
they had done was nothing to what they had yet to do.

"You can't," she said.

"I can. Easily. I miscalculated the time it would take."

She said nothing, for she knew that he had lied. His miscalculation
was all the other way. She bent again over her work. It was all that
he could do not to lift her arms gently but firmly from the table, to
take away her pen and ink, and put out her lamp. He would have liked
to have done some violence to the catalogue.

"I say, you know, you'll make yourself ill. You're burning the candle
at both ends. May I suggest that the game isn't worth the candle?"

"Have you very much more to do?"

"About two hours' work. Would it be imp