d to do this thing handsomely.
Rickman envied him his inspiration, his "merely nominal sum."

"Thank you. The books were not mine," said Lucia in spite of another
meaning look from her ally.

"Quite so. But I should disregard that if I were you. Anyhow you can
think it over, and if you change your mind you can let me or Mr
Rickman know before the sale."

Lucia looked down at him from her height. "I shall not change my mind.
If I want to keep any of the books, I can buy them from Mr. Rickman."

She turned to Rickman in the doorway. "All the same, it was kind of
you to think of it." She said it very distinctly, so that Mr.
Pilkington could hear.

Rickman followed her out of the room and closed the door behind them.
She turned on him eyes positively luminous with trust. It was as if
she had abandoned the leading of her intellect and flung the reins on
the neck of her intuition.

"I was right, wasn't I? I would so much rather buy them back from
you."

"From my father?"

"It's the same thing, isn't it?"

He smiled sadly. "I'm afraid it isn't, quite. Why didn't you accept
his offer?"

"I couldn't." She shuddered slightly. Her face expressed her deep and
desperate repugnance. "I _can_ buy them back from you. He is really
arranging with your father, isn't he?"

"Yes." It was the third time that she had appealed from Pilkington to
him, and there was a profound humiliation in the thought that at this
precise moment the loathsome Dicky might be of more solid use to her
than he.

"Well then," she said almost triumphantly. "I shall be safe. You will
do your best for me."

It was a statement, but he met it as if it had been a question.

"I will indeed."

He saw that it was in identifying his father with him that she left it
to their honour.

CHAPTER XXXII

Dicky Pilkington did not belong to the aristocracy of finance. Indeed,
finance had not in any form claimed him at the first.

Under the grey frock-coat and gleaming shirt-front, hidden away behind
the unapparent splendours of Dicky Pilkington's attire (his undermost
garments were of woven silk), in a corner of his young barbarian heart
there lurked an obscure veneration for culture and for art. When his
day's work was done, the time that Dicky did not spend in the
promenade of the Jubilee Variety Theatre, he spent in reading Karl
Pearson and Robert Louis Stevenson, with his feet on the fender. He
knew the Greek characters. He _said_ he could tell P