marched Rickman out into the suburbs and on
to a lonely place on Hampstead Heath. And there, for the space of one
hour, with his arm linked in Rickman's, he wrestled with Rickman for
his body and his soul. Jewdwine's cry had been, "Beware of the
friendship of little men"; the burden of Maddox was, "Beware of the
love of little women."

"That's all you know about it, Maddy. The love of great women absorbs
you, dominates you. The little women leave you free."

Maddox groaned.

"A fat lot of freedom you'll get, Ricky, when you're married." Rickman
looked straight before him to the deep blue hills of the west, as if
freedom lay on the other side of them. "Good God," he said, "what am I
to do? I must marry. I can't go back to Poppy Grace, and her sort."

"If that's all," said Maddox, "I don't see much difference. Except
that marriage is worse. It lasts longer." Whereupon Rickman blushed,
and said that wasn't all, and that Maddox was a brute. He would change
his opinion when he knew Miss Walker.

Before very long he had an opportunity of changing it.

Rickman had been in error when he told Flossie that if she would
consent to marry him he would never again be ill. For he was ill the
first week in September, not two years after he had made that
ill-considered statement. The Fielding episode, when the first fine
stimulus was over, had left him miserable and restless. It was as if
he had heard the sound of Lucia Harden's voice passing through the
immeasurable darkness that divided them. And now he seemed to be
suffering from something not unlike the nervous fever that had
attacked him once before at Harmouth; complicated, this time, by a
severe cold on the chest, caught by walking about through pouring rain
in great agony of mind.

For Flossie (who may have felt latterly that she had chanced upon
another season of depression in her woman's trade) that illness was a
piece of amazing good luck, coming as it did at the moment of Keith's
misgivings. It not only drew them together, just as they were drifting
insensibly apart, but it revealed them to each other in a tenderer and
serener light. There was a little hard spot in Flossie which was
impervious to the subtler charm of Rickman when he was well. But
Rickman ill and at her mercy, confined to the bed where (so long as
Flossie waited on him) he lay very quietly, with the sheet drawn tight
up to his chin, in a state of touching dependence and humiliation, was
a wholly dif