“Mr. Rickman,” she said, “do you reelly wish to go, or do you not?”

He looked up surprised.  “My dear Mrs. Downey, I don’t; believe me.  Did I ever say I did?”

Her face grew brighter and rounder till the very glaze on it made it shine like a great red sun.  “Well, we’d all been wondering, and some of us said one thing, and some another, and I didn’t know what to think.  But if you want to stay perhaps—­we can come to some arrangement.”  It was the consecrated phrase.

He shook his head.

“Come, I’ve been thinking it over.  You won’t be paying less than five shillings a week for your empty room, perhaps more?”

He would, he said, be paying six shillings.

“There now!  And that, with your food, makes sixteen shillings at the very least.”

“Well—­it depends upon the food.”

“I should think it did depend upon it.”  Mrs. Downey’s face literally blazed with triumph.  She said to herself, “I was right.  Mr. Spinks said he’d take it out of his clothes.  Miss Bramble said he’d take it out of his fire. I said he’d take it out of his dinner.”

“Now,” she continued, “if you didn’t mind moving into the front attic—­it’s a good attic—­for a time, I could let you ’ave that, and board you, for fifteen shillings a week, or for fourteen, I could, and welcome.  As I seldom let that attic, it would be money in the pocket to me.”

“Come,” she went on, well pleased.  “I know all about it.  Why, Mr. Blenkinsop, when he first started to write, he lived up there six months at a time.  He had his ups, you may say, and his downs.  One year in the attic and the next on the second floor, having his meals separate and his own apartments.  Then up he’d go again quite cheerful, as regularly as the bills came round.”  Here Mrs. Downey entered at some length upon the history of the splendour and misery of Mr. Blenkinsop.  “And that, I suppose,” said Mrs. Downey, “is what it is to be a poet.”

“In fact,” said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss Roots, “talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly understand the allusion.”

After about half an hour’s conversation she left him without having received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal.  That did not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman was not going after all.

At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door.  It was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the next evening.  Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the signature made his brain reel for a second.  He stood staring at it.  From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.

Jewdwine?  Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do with him.