hat divided them. It showed her
secure in her detachment, her freedom from any intimate thought of
him, from any thought of him at all. But in this last act of kindness
it could hardly be that she had not taken him into consideration. She
could hardly have been pleased if she knew he had been awake, yet she
had risked his waking. Before she risked it she must have credited him
with something of her own simplicity of soul.

And this was how he had repaid her.

He saw her as she had knelt by him, mending the dying fire, as she had
stood looking at him, as she had stooped over him to cover him, and as
she had turned away; and he saw himself, sinning as he had sinned
against her in his heart.

He knew perfectly well that the average man would have felt no
compunction whatever upon this head. To the average man his
imagination (if he has any) is an unreal thing; to Rickman it was the
most real thing about him. It was so young, and in its youth so
ungovernably creative, that it flung out its ideas, as it were, alive
and kicking. It was only partially true of him that his dream was
divorced from reality. For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to
the average man are merely phantoms), projected themselves with a
bodily vividness and violence. Not only had they the colour and
authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality
denied to facts. His imagination was in this so far spiritual that it
perceived desire to be the eternal soul of the deed, and the deed to
be but the perishing body of desire. From this point of view, conduct
may figure as comparatively unimportant; therefore this point of view
is very properly avoided by the average man.

Rickman, now reduced to the last degree of humility and contrition,
picked up Lucia's shawl very gently and reverently, and folded it with
care, smoothing out the horrid creases he had made in it. He took it
to the other end of the room and laid it over the back of her chair,
so that it might look to Robert as if his mistress had left it there.

Would he see her again that morning? That depended on the amount of
work that remained for her to do. He looked over her table; her tray
was empty, the slips were pinned together in bundles in the way he had
taught her, Section XII, Poetry, was complete. There was nothing now
to keep her in the library. And he had only ten days' work to do. He
might see her once or twice perhaps on those days; but she would not
sit w