ith him, nor work with him, and when the ten days were over she
would go away and he would never see her again.

Then he remembered that he had got to tell her and go away himself, at
once, this very morning.

Meanwhile he sat down and worked till it was time to go back to his
hotel. He worked mechanically, miserably, oppressed alike by his sense
of his own villainy and of the futility of his task. He did not know
how, when it was ended, he was to take up this kind of work again. He
had only been kept up by his joy in her presence, and in her absence
by the hope of her return. But he could not bear to look into a future
in which she had no part.

CHAPTER XXVII

He found a letter from Dicky Pilkington waiting for him at the hotel.
Dicky's subtlety seemed to have divined his scruples, for he gave him
the information he most wanted in terms whose terseness left very
little room for uncertainty. "Look sharp," wrote Dicky, "and let me
know if you've made up your great mind about that library. If Freddy
Harden doesn't pay up I shall have to put my men in on the
twenty-seventh. Between you and me there isn't the ghost of a chance
for Freddy. I hear the unlucky devil's just cleaned himself out at
Monte Carlo."

The twenty-seventh? It was the day when Miss Harden was to join her
father at Cannes. The coincidence of dates was significant; it
amounted to proof. It meant that Sir Frederick must have long
anticipated the catastrophe, and that he had the decency to spare her
the last painful details. She would not have to witness the invasion
of the Vandals, the overturning of the household gods, and the
defilement of their sacred places.

Well, he thought bitterly, they couldn't be much more defiled than
they were already. He saw himself as an abominable object, a thing
with a double face and an unclean and aitchless tongue, sitting there
from morning to night, spying, calculating, appraising, with a view to
fraud. At least that was how she would think of him when she knew; and
he had got to tell her.

He was on the rack again; and the wonder was how he had ever left it.
It seemed to him that he could never have been long released at any
time. He had had moments of comparative ease, when he could lie on it
at one end of the room and see Lucia sitting at the other, and the
sight of her must have soothed his agony. He had had moments of
forgetfulness, of illusion, when he had gone to sleep on the rack, and
had dreame