about was the secretaryship I
offered you. I'm afraid we must give it up."

"Oh--Miss Harden--" his tone expressed that he had always given it up,
that it was not to be thought of for an instant. But evidently she was
possessed with the idea that he had a claim upon her.

"I'm very sorry, but as things have turned out I shan't be able to
keep a secretary. In fact, as you may have heard, I'm not able to keep
anything hardly--not even my promises."

"Please--please don't think of it--"

"There is no use thinking of it. Still, I wanted you to know that I
really meant it--I believed it could be done. Of course I don't know
how much you really wanted it."

"Wanted it? I'd 'ave given half my life for a year of it."

Lucia's hand, laid lightly on the table's edge, felt a strong
vibration communicated to it from Mr. Rickman's arm. She looked up, in
time to see his white face quiver before he hid it with his hand.

"I'm so sorry. Did it mean so much to you?"

He smiled through his agony at the cause assigned to it. "I'm not
thinking of that. What it means to me--what it always will mean is
your goodness--in thinking of it. In thinking of it now."

It was his nearest approach to a sympathetic allusion.

She did not wince (perceptibly), but she ignored the allusion.

"Oh, that's nothing. You would have been of great use to me. If I
thought of helping you at all, my idea was simply--how shall I put
it?--to make up in some way for the harm I've done you."

"What harm have you ever done me?"

For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous
passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she
explained.

"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was
responsible for your illness."

He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well
have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not
know that."

"I knew it, though."

"You knew it? How did you know it?"

"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him
the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to
you about."

He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss
Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater
difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done,
point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a
statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.

"If," she s