Seeing Italy? Italy that he had once desired with all his heart to see. And now it was nothing to him that he would see Italy; the point was that he would see her. Talk of open doors! It was dawning on him that the door of heaven was being opened to him. He could say nothing. He leaned forward staring at his own loosely clasped hands.
She mistook his silence for hesitation, and it was her turn to become diffident and shy. "The salary would not be very large, I'm afraid—"
The salary? He smiled. She had opened the door of heaven for him and she actually proposed to pay him for walking in!
"But there would be no expenses, and you would have space and time. I should not want your help for more than three or four hours in the morning. After that you would be absolutely free."
And still he said nothing. But the fine long nervous hands tortured each other in their clasp. So this was what came of keeping up the farce?
"Of course," she said, "you must think it over."
"Miss Harden, I don't know how to thank you. I don't know what to say."
"Don't say anything. Think."
"I don't know what to think."
But he was thinking hard; trying to realize where he was and what was being proposed to him. To have entertained the possibility of such a proposal in the middle of last week would have argued that he was drunk. And here he was indubitably, conspicuously sober. Sober? Well, not exactly. He ought never to have taken that little cup of black coffee! Was there any difference between drinking champagne with Miss Poppy Grace and drinking coffee with Lucia Harden, when the effect was so indistinguishably the same? Or rather, for completeness and splendour of hallucination there was no comparison. He was drunk, drunk as he had never been drunk before, most luminously, most divinely intoxicated with that little cup of black coffee.