ad for the time
being lost sight of Lucia.

As for marrying his cousin, that was a question with which for the
present he felt he really could not deal. No doubt it would crop up
again later on to worry him.

Meanwhile he gave to Lucia every minute that he could spare from the
allurements of his golden bride. For more than a fortnight her affairs
had been weighing on him like a nightmare. But only like a nightmare,
a thing that troubled him chiefly in the watches of the night, leaving
his waking thoughts free to go about the business of the day, a thing
against which he felt that it was impossible to contend. For Lucia's
affairs had the vagueness, the confusion of a nightmare. Details no
doubt there were; but they had disappeared in the immensity of the
general effect. Being powerless to deal with them himself, he had sent
down his own solicitor to assist in disentangling them. But as the
full meaning of the disaster sank into him he realized with the cold
pang of disappointment that their marriage must now be indefinitely
postponed.

To be sure, what had as yet passed between them hardly amounted to an
understanding. All Jewdwine's understandings had been with himself.
But the very fact that he was not prepared to act on such an
understanding made him feel as responsible as if it actually existed.
Being conscious of something rather more than cousinly tenderness in
the past, he really could not be sure that he was not already
irretrievably committed. Not that Lucia's manner had ever taken
anything of the sort for granted. He had nothing to fear from her. But
he had much (he told himself) to fear from his own conscience and his
honour.

All this was the result of deliberate reflection. In the beginning of
the trouble, at the first news of his uncle's death, his sympathy with
Lucia had been free from any sordid anxiety for the future which he
then conceived to be inseparably bound up with his own. Rickman's
letter was the first intimation that anything had gone wrong. It was a
shock none the less severe because it was not altogether a surprise.
It was just like his uncle Frederick to raise money on the Harden
Library. The shock lay in Rickman's assumption that he, Jewdwine, was
prepared, instantly, at ten days' notice, to redeem it. It was what he
would have liked to have done; what, if he had been a rich man, he
infallibly would have done; what even now, with his limited resources,
he might do if it were not for t