thing to let too much dust accumulate on the tops of books, neither was it altogether desirable that a strong south-westerly light should play upon them all day long.  Had she ever noticed how the bindings were cracking and fading?  For all this he seemed to be blaming Lucia; and this, Lucia tried to persuade herself, was no great matter; but when he asked for a catalogue, and she calmly told him that there was none, he became involved in a sentence about a scandal and a Vandal in which his opinion of his uncle Frederick unmistakably appeared.  He even forgot himself so far as to reflect on the sanity of the late Master of Lazarus, at which point Lucia had left him to his reflections.

She had not yet forgiven Horace for his interference that day, nor for his remark about the scandal and the Vandal.  As for his other observations, they were insufferably rue.  Hence her desperate efforts to set the library in order before she went abroad; hence the secrecy and haste with which she had applied to Rickman’s, without asking Horace’s advice as she naturally would have done; hence, too, her vast delight at the success of her unassisted scheme.  Mr. Rickman was turning out splendidly.  If she had looked all through London she could not have found a better man.

CHAPTER XX

It was Easter Sunday and Lucia’s heart was glad, for she had had a letter from her father.  There never was such a father and there never were such letters as, once in a blue moon and when the fancy seized him, he wrote to his adorable Lucy.  Generally speaking they were all about himself and his fiddle, the fiddle that when he was at home he played from morning to night.  But this letter was more exciting.  It was full of all the foolish and delightful things they were to do together in Cannes, in Venice and in Florence and in Rome.  He was always in one or other of these places, but this was the first time he had proposed that his adorable Lucy should join him.  “You’re too young to see the world,” he used to say.  “You wouldn’t enjoy it, Lucy, you really wouldn’t.  The world is simply wasted on any woman under five and thirty.”  Lucia was not quite five and twenty.  She was not very strong, and she felt that if she didn’t see the world soon she might not enjoy it very much when she did see it.  And it was barely a month now till the twenty-seventh.

Lucia went singing downstairs and into the library to throw all its four windows open to the delicious spring, and there, to her amazement (for it was Sunday), she came upon Mr. Rickman cataloguing hard.