ne. He could still feel her
hand pushing against his outstretched arm. There had been nothing to
wound him in that gesture of repulse; it was as if she had accepted
rather than refused his touch, as if her numbed body took from it the
impetus it craved.

There was a sound of hurry and confusion in the house; servants went
up and downstairs, or stood about whispering in the passages. He heard
footsteps in that room above him which he knew to be her room. A bell
rang once; he could feel the vibration of the wire down the wall of
the library. It was her bell and he wondered if she were ill.

Robert rushed in with a wild white face, shaken out of his respectful
calm. He was asking Rickman if he had seen this month's Bradshaw. They
joined in a frenzied search for it.

She was not ill; she was going away.

A few minutes later he heard the sound of wheels grating on the gravel
drive, of the front door being flung open, of her voice, her sweet
quiet voice, then the grating of the wheels again, and she was gone.
That, of course, ended it.

Now for the first time he realized what Sir Frederick's death meant
for himself. In thus snatching her from him in the very crisis of
confession it had taken away his chance of redeeming his dishonour.

If he had only told her!

CHAPTER XXVIII

He did not go back to town on the seventh, after all. He stayed to
finish roughly, brutally almost, with the utmost possible dispatch,
the disastrous catalogue, which would now be required, whatever
happened. Until every book in the library had passed through his hands
he was hardly in a position to give a just estimate of its value. His
father had written again in some perturbation. It seemed that the old
song for which he might obtain the Harden library went to the tune of
one thousand pounds; but Pilkington was asking one thousand two
hundred. "It's a large sum," wrote Isaac, "and without more precise
information than you've given me yet, I can't tell whether we should
be justified in paying it."

That confirmed his worst misgivings. He answered it very precisely
indeed. "We shouldn't be morally justified in paying less than four
thousand for such a collection; and we should make a pretty big profit
at that. But if we can't afford the price we must simply withdraw. In
fact I consider that we ought to hold back in any case until we see
whether Miss Harden or any of her people are going to come forward.
It's only fair to give them t