For one moment he thought that she had discovered his preposterous passion, and reproached herself for being a cause of pain. But she explained.
"I ought to say the harm the catalogue did you. I'm afraid it was responsible for your illness."
He protested. But she stuck to it. "And after all I might just as well have let you go. For the library will have to be sold. But I did not know that."
"I knew it, though."
"You knew it? How did you know it?"
"I know Mr. Pilkington, who knows my father. He practically gave him the refusal of the library. Which is exactly what I want to speak to you about."
He explained the situation to her as he had explained it to Miss Palliser, only at greater length and with considerably greater difficulty. For Lucia did not take it up as Miss Palliser had done, point by point, she laid it down, rather, dismissed it with a statement of her trust in the integrity of Rickman's.
"If," she said, "the library must be sold, I'm very glad that it's your father who is going to buy it."
He tried to make her see (without too deeply incriminating his father) that this was not the destiny most to be desired for it.
It was in approaching this part of his subject that he most diverged from his manner of treating it before Miss Palliser.