"If I'm not mistaken, he's a sort of friend of yours."
"Keith Rickman? Oh—"
"Do you remember the day we first talked about him?"
He did indeed. He remembered how unwilling he had been to talk about him; and he was still more unwilling now. He wanted, and Lucia knew that he wanted, to talk about himself.
"It's ten years ago," she said. "Have you been waiting all this time to see him?"
He coloured. "I saw him before you did, Lucia. I saw him a very long way off. I was the first to see."
"Were you? Then—oh Horace, if you saw all those years ago why haven't you said so?"
"I have said so, many times."
"Whom have you said it to?"
"To you for one. To every one, I think, who knows him. They'll bear me out."