their eagerness to buy.  That was his stern duty in the second-hand department.  But there had been so many occasions on which he had never done his duty; times when he was tempted to actual defiance of it, when a wistful calculating look in the eyes of some seedy scholar would knock all the moral fibre out of him, and a two and sixpenny book would go for ninepence or a shilling.  And such was his conception of loyalty to Rickman’s, that he generally paid for these excesses out of his own pocket, so that conscience was satisfied both ways.  Therefore there had been no moral element in his dislike to Rickman’s; he had shrunk from it with the half-fantastic aversion of the mind, not with this sickening hatred of the soul.  After three weeks of Lucia Harden’s society, he had perceived how sordid were the beginnings from which his life had sprung.  As his boyish dreams had been wrought like a broidery of stars on the floor of the back-shop, so honour, an unattainable ideal, had stood out in forlorn splendour against a darker and a dirtier background.  He had felt himself obscurely tainted and involved.  Now he realized, as he had never realized before, that the foundations of Rickman’s were laid in bottomless corruption.  It was a House built, not only on every vile and vulgar art known to trade, but on many instances of such a day’s work as this.  And it was into this pit of infamy that his father was blandly inviting him to descend.  He had such an abominably clear vision of it that he writhed and shuddered with shame and disgust; he could hardly have suffered more if he had gone down into it bodily himself.  He endured in imagination the emotions that his father should have felt and apparently did not feel.

He came out of his shudderings and writhings unspeakably consoled and clean; knowing that it is with such nausea and pangs that the soul of honour is born.

Their eyes met; and it was the elder Rickman’s turn for bitterness.  It had come, the moment that he had dreaded.  He was afraid to meet his son’s eyes, for he knew that they had judged him.  He felt that he stood revealed in that sudden illumination of the boy’s radiant soul.  An instinct of self-preservation now prompted him to belittle Keith’s character.  He had found amazing comfort in the reflection that Keith was not all that he ought to be.  As far as Isaac could make out, he was always running after the women.  He was a regular young profligate, an infidel he was.  What right had he to sit in judgement?

Shrewd even in anger, he took refuge in an adroit misconstruction of Keith’s language.  “I lay down no conditions.  I’m much too anxious about you.  I want to see you in a house of your own, settled down and married to some good girl who’ll keep you steady and respectable.  It’s a simple straightforward offer, and you take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it on two conditions.  First, as I said before, that we either withdraw or pay over that three thousand.  Second, that in the future no bargains are made without my knowledge—­and consent.  That means giving me the entire control of my own department.”