ving his meals
separate and his own apartments. Then up he'd go again quite cheerful,
as regularly as the bills came round." Here Mrs. Downey entered at
some length upon the history of the splendour and misery of Mr.
Blenkinsop. "And that, I suppose," said Mrs. Downey, "is what it is to
be a poet."

"In fact," said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss
Roots, "talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly
understand the allusion."

After about half an hour's conversation she left him without having
received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal. That did
not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman
was not going after all.

At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door. It
was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the
next evening. Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the
signature made his brain reel for a second. He stood staring at it.
From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of
joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.

Jewdwine? Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the
Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do
with him.

Jewdwine was another link. And at that thought his heart heaved and
became alive again.

CHAPTER XXXIX

In the act of death, as in everything else that he had ever done, Sir
Frederick Harden had hit on the most inappropriate, the most
inconvenient moment--the moment, that is to say, when Horace Jewdwine
had been appointed editor of _The Museion_, when every minute of his
day was taken up with forming his staff and thoroughly reorganizing
the business of his paper. It was, besides, the long-desired moment,
for which all his years at Oxford had been a training and a
consecration; it was that supreme, that nuptial moment in which an
ambitious man embraces for the first time his Opportunity.

The news of Lucia's trouble found him, as it were, in the ardours and
preoccupations of the honeymoon.

It was characteristic of Jewdwine that in this courting of Opportunity
there had been no violent pursuit, no dishevelment, no seizing by the
hair. He had hung back, rather; he had waited, till he had given
himself value, till Opportunity had come to him, with delicate and
ceremonious approach. Still, his head had swum a little at her coming,
so that in the contemplation of his golden bride he h