"In fact," said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss Roots, "talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly understand the allusion."
After about half an hour's conversation she left him without having received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal. That did not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman was not going after all.
At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door. It was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the next evening. Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the signature made his brain reel for a second. He stood staring at it. From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.
Jewdwine? Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do with him.
Jewdwine was another link. And at that thought his heart heaved and became alive again.
CHAPTER XXXIX
In the act of death, as in everything else that he had ever done, Sir Frederick Harden had hit on the most inappropriate, the most inconvenient moment—the moment, that is to say, when Horace Jewdwine had been appointed editor of The Museion, when every minute of his day was taken up with forming his staff and thoroughly reorganizing the business of his paper. It was, besides, the long-desired moment, for which all his years at Oxford had been a training and a consecration; it was that supreme, that nuptial moment in which an ambitious man embraces for the first time his Opportunity.
The news of Lucia's trouble found him, as it were, in the ardours and preoccupations of the honeymoon.