ath with a slight shudder, pushed his chair back
from the table, and strode out of the room.

Spinks looked after him sorrowfully.

"Wy couldn't you leave him alone, Soper? You might see he didn't want
to talk."

"How could I see wot he wanted? One minute 'e's as chatty and
sociable--and the next he's up like three dozen of bottled stout.
_It's wot I sy._ You can't dee-pend on 'im with any certainty."

That opinion was secretly shared by Miss Flossie Walker.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Rickman, it seemed, was doomed to inspire that sense of agonizing
uncertainty.

It was the second evening after his return. The Dinner was not going
off well. Miss Walker was depressed, Mr. Spinks was not in his
accustomed spirits, and Mrs. Downey had been going about with red eyes
all day. Mr. Rickman had confided to her the deplorable state of his
finances. And Mrs. Downey had said to herself she had known from the
first that he would not be permanent.

He didn't want to be permanent. He desired to vanish, to disappear
from the boarding-house and the boarders, and from Poppy Grace on the
balcony next door; to get away from every face and every voice that he
had known before he knew Lucia Harden's. Being convinced that he would
never see her again, he wanted to be alone with his vivid and piercing
memory of her. At first it was the pain that pierced. She had taken
out her little two-edged sword and stabbed him. It wouldn't have
mattered, he said, if the sword had been a true little sword, but it
wasn't; it had snapt and left a nasty bit of steel inside him. Her
last phrase was the touch that finished him. But the very sting of it
created a healthy reaction. By his revolt against that solitary
instance of her cruelty he had recovered his right to dwell upon her
kindness. He dwelt upon it until at times he entered again into
possession of the tender, beautiful, dominating dream. So intense was
his hallucination, that as he walked alone in any southerly direction
he still felt Muttersmoor on his right hand and Harcombe on his left,
and he had waked in the morning to the sound of the sea beating upon
Harmouth beach.

But these feelings visited him more rarely in the boarding-house than
elsewhere. That was why he wanted to get away from it. The illusion
was destroyed by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table. Not
that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them
some quality that he had not observed before.