had received, engulfed
him now beyond deliverance and return. If only he had known; if he
could have been sure of her friendship; if he could have seen her for
one moment in many months, one hour in many years, the thing would
never have begun; or, being begun, could never have been carried
through.

Meanwhile the friendship remained. His being married could not make it
less; and his being unmarried would certainly not have made it more.
As there could be neither more nor less of it, he ought to have been
able to regard it as a simple, definite, solidly satisfactory thing.
But he had no sooner realized that so much at least was his than he
perceived that he had only the very vaguest notion as to the nature
and extent of it. Of all human relations, friendship was the
obscurest, the most uncertainly defined. At this point he remembered
one fatal thing about her; it had always been her nature to give
pleasure and be kind. The passion, he imagined, was indestructible;
and with a temperament like that she might be ten times his friend
without his knowing from one day to another how he really stood with
her. And hitherto one means of judging had been altogether denied to
him; he had never had an opportunity of observing her ways with other
men.

This third evening he watched her jealously, testing her dealings with
him by her behaviour to the boarders, and notably to Spinks and Soper.
For Lucia, whether she was afraid of hurting the feelings of these
people, or whether she hesitated to establish herself altogether in
Mr. Rickman's study, had determined to spend the first hours after
dinner in the drawing-room. Miss Roots protested against these weak
concessions to the social order. "You'll never be able to stand them,
dear," she said; "they're terrible."

But Lucia had her way. "You've stood them for five years," said she.

"Yes, but I've had my work, and I'm used to it; and in any case I'm
not Miss Lucia Harden."

"Mr. Rickman stands them."

"Does he? You wouldn't say so if you'd known him for five years."

"I wonder why he stayed."

"Do you? Perhaps Miss Flossie could enlighten you."

"Of course. I was forgetting her."

"Don't forget her," said Miss Roots drily; "she's important."

Miss Roots went up to the study, and Lucia turned into the
drawing-room. She owned to herself that what took her there was not so
much an impulse of politeness as an irresistible desire to know what
manner of people Keith Rickman h