But I wouldn't be in a hurry to
make any arrangements with Pilkington, if I were you." Not the
smallest reference to the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace or the
_Aurea Legenda_ of Wynkyn de Worde.
Why indeed should he trouble himself? He couldn't understand his
father's state of mind. He had now a positive intuition that Sir
Frederick would recover in the manner of a gentleman whose motto was
_Invictus_; an infinite assurance was conveyed by that tilted
faun-like smile. He even found himself believing in his own delightful
future as Miss Harden's private secretary, so entirely had he
submitted to the empire of divine possibility.
Meanwhile he redoubled his attentions to the catalogue. (Could there
be anything more unreasonable than that catalogue _raisonne_?) He had
frequently got up and worked at it for an hour or two before
breakfast, lifted out of bed by the bounding of his heart. But whereas
he had been in the habit of leaving it at any time between nine
o'clock and midnight, he now sat up with it till the small hours of
the morning. This extreme devotion was necessary if he was to finish
it by the twenty-seventh. It was now the fifteenth.
He had told Miss Harden that he could work better by himself, and
apparently she had taken him at his word; she had left him to finish
the catalogue alone. As it happened he didn't work a bit better by
himself. What with speculating on the chance of her appearing,
listening for her voice and her footsteps on the stairs, or the
distant sound of her playing, to say nothing of his desperate efforts
not to stare out of the windows when he knew her to be in the garden,
Lucia absent was even more disturbing than Lucia on the spot.
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