"Not much; though it is my cousin's paper. But as Mr. Rickman writes for it, you see—"
"Well, how was I to know that? He's always writing for something; and he'd never think of coming to me every time. I never talk shop to him, and he never talks shop to me. Of course he told me that he'd got on to some better paying thing," she added, anxious to show that she was not shut out from the secrets of his heart; "but when you said Metropolis I didn't take it in."
Lucia made no further attempt to converse. She said good-night and followed Sophie Roots to her tiny room.
"That was rather dreadful," she said to herself. "I wonder—" But if she did not linger long over her wondering neither did she stop to find out why she was so passionately anxious to think well of the woman who was to be Keith Rickman's wife, and why it was such a relief to her to be angry with Sophie for teasing the poor child.
CHAPTER LV
He asked himself how it was that he had had no premonition of the thing that was about to happen to him; that the supreme moment should have come upon him so casually and with so light a step; that he went to meet it in a mood so commonplace and unprepared? (Good Heavens! He remembered that he had been eating pea soup at the time, and wishing it were artichoke.)
Had he not known that she would come back again, and in just that way? Had he not looked for her coming five years ago? And what were five years, after all? How was it that he had heard no summons of the golden and reverberant hour?
And what was he going to do with it, or it with him, now that it had come? That was a question that he preferred to leave unanswered for the present.