aid, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's
your father who is going to buy it."

He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father)
that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.

It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged
from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.

Miss Palliser had appreciated the commercial point of view. Her
practical mind accepted the assumption that a dealer was but human,
and that abnegation on his part in such a matter would amount to
nothing less than a moral miracle. But Miss Harden would have a
higher conception of human obligation than Miss Palliser; at any rate
he could hardly expect her sense of honour to be less delicate than
his own, and if _he_ considered that his father was morally bound to
withdraw from the business she could only think one thing of his
remaining in it. Therefore to suggest to Miss Harden that his father
might insist upon remaining, constituted a far more terrible exposure
of that person than anything he had said to Miss Palliser.

"Why shouldn't he buy it?" she asked.

"Because, I'm afraid, selling it in--in that way, you won't make much
money over it."

"Well--it's not a question of making money, it's a question of paying
a debt."

"How much you make--or lose--of course, depends on the amount of the
debt--what it was valued at."

Lucia, unlike Kitty, was neither suspicious nor discreet. She had the
required fact at her fingers' ends and instantly produced it. "It was
valued at exactly one thousand pounds."

"And it should have been valued at four. My father can't give anything
like that. We ought to be able to find somebody who can. But it might
take a considerable time."

"And there is no time. What do you advise me to do then?"

"Well, if we could persuade Mr. Pilkington to sell by auction that
would be all right. If we can't, I advise you to buy it back, or a
part of it, yourself. Buy back the books that make it valuable. You've
got the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the _Aurea Legenda_
printed by Wynken de Worde." (He positively blushed as he consummated
this final act of treachery to Rickman's.) "And heaps of others
equally valuable; I can give you a list of fifty or so. You can buy
them for a pound a-piece and sell the lot for three thousand. If
Pilkington collars the rest he'll still be paid, and there may be
something over."

She considered a moment. "H