He looked over her table; her tray
was empty, the slips were pinned together in bundles in the way he had
taught her, Section XII, Poetry, was complete. There was nothing now
to keep her in the library. And he had only ten days' work to do. He
might see her once or twice perhaps on those days; but she would not
sit with him, nor work with him, and when the ten days were over she
would go away and he would never see her again.
Then he remembered that he had got to tell her and go away himself, at
once, this very morning.
Meanwhile he sat down and worked till it was time to go back to his
hotel. He worked mechanically, miserably, oppressed alike by his sense
of his own villainy and of the futility of his task. He did not know
how, when it was ended, he was to take up this kind of work again. He
had only been kept up by his joy in her presence, and in her absence
by the hope of her return. But he could not bear to look into a future
in which she had no part.
CHAPTER XXVII
He found a letter from Dicky Pilkington waiting for him at the hotel.
Dicky's subtlety seemed to have divined his scruples, for he gave him
the information he most wanted in terms whose terseness left very
little room for uncertainty. "Look sharp," wrote Dicky, "and let me
know if you've made up your great mind about that library. If Freddy
Harden doesn't pay up I shall have to put my men in on the
twenty-seventh. Between you and me there isn't the ghost of a chance
for Freddy.
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