"It won't prove anything. Events never do. They merely happen."
"Well, if they happen wrong, and I can help you, you've only got to come to me."
Never in all his life had Jewdwine so nearly achieved the grace of humility as in this offer of his help. He would have given anything if Rickman could have accepted it, but refusal was a foregone conclusion. And yet he offered it.
"Thanks—thanks awfully." It was Rickman who appeared nervous and ashamed. His mouth twitched; he held out his hand abruptly; he was desperately anxious to say good-night and get it over. It seemed to him that he had been six years taking leave of Jewdwine; each year had seen the departure of some quality he had known him by. He wanted to have done with it now for ever.
But Jewdwine would not see his hand. He turned away; paced the floor; swung back on a hesitating heel and approached him, smiling.
"You're not going to disappear altogether, are you? You'll turn up again, and let me know how you're getting on?"
To Rickman there was something tragic and retrospective in Jewdwine's smile. It had no joy in it, but an appeal, rather, to the memory of what he had been. He found it irresistible.
"Thanks. I shall get on all right; but I'll turn up again sometime."
Jewdwine's smile parted with its pathos, its appeal. It conveyed a promise, an assurance that whatever else had perished in him his friendship was not dead.
For there were ways, apart from the ways of journalism, in which Jewdwine could be noble still. And still, as he watched Rickman's departing back, the back that he seemed doomed to know so well, he said to himself—