ave a fit. Poor dear!
_Did_ I crumple his nice little stylish collar!"

He endured while she smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle, her head very
much on one side. "You see, Razors, we've been such chums. Whatever
happens, I want to be all right and straight with you."

"What should happen?"

"Oh, anything." Again there was that troubling of the bright shallows
of her eyes. "You remember larst time you were here?" (his shudder
told her that he remembered well). "I _did_ try to send you away,
didn't I?"

"As far as I can remember, you did."

"What did you think I did it for?"

"I suppose, because you wanted me to go."

"Stupid! I did it because I wanted you to _stay_." She looked into his
eyes and the light went out of her own; among its paint and powder her
audacity lay dead. It was as if she saw on his face the shadow of
Lucia Harden, and knew that her hour had come.

She met it laughing. "Good-night, Ricky-ticky."

As he took her hand he muttered something about being "fearfully
sorry."

"Sorry?" Poppy conjured up a poor flickering ghost of her inimitable
wink. "The champagne was bad, dear. Don't you worry."

When he had left her, she flung herself face downwards on the divan.
"Oh, dicky, will you hold your horrid little tongue?" But as she
sobbed aloud, the canary, symbol of invincible Propriety, rocked on
his perch and shook over her his piercing and exultant song.

Rickman was sorry for her, but the sight and touch of her were hateful
to him. He took her advice however. He had had good luck with some
articles, and he called on Pilkington the next afternoon and paid him
his thirty pounds with the interest. Dicky was in a good humour and
inclined to be communicative. He congratulated him on his present
berth, and informed him that Rickman's was "going it." The old man had
just raised four thousand on the Harden library, the only security
that he, Dicky, would accept.

"I suppose," said Rickman simply, "you'd no idea of its value when you
let him buy it?"

Dicky stared through his eye-glass with his blue eyes immense and
clear.

"My dear fellow, do you take me for a d----d fool?"

So that had been Dicky's little game? Trust Dicky.

And yet for the time being, held in the opposing grip of two firm
cupidities, it was safe, the great Harden library, once the joy of
scholars, loved with such high intellectual passion, and now the
centre of so many hot schemes and rivalries and lusts. Now that the
work