For his own part Isaac dated his decline from the hour of his son’s defection.  He had not been brought to this pass by any rashness in speculation, or by any flaw whatever in his original scheme.  But his original scheme had taken for granted Keith’s collaboration.  He had calculated to a nicety what it would cost him to build up his fortunes; and all these calculations had been based on the union of his own borrowed capital with Keith’s brilliant brains.  And Keith with unimaginable perfidy had removed himself and his brilliant brains at the crisis of the start.  Isaac thought he had estimated pretty accurately the value of his son’s contribution; but it was only in the actual experiment of separation that he realized the difference it had made.

The immediate effect of the blow was to paralyse the second-hand department.  As far as new books went Isaac was fairly safe.  If the Public was tricky he was generally up to its tricks.  But with second-hand books you never knew where you were, not unless you had made a special study of the subject.  Owing to his defective education he had always been helpless in the second-hand shop; liable at any moment to be over-reached by one of those innocent, lantern-jawed student fellows who go poking their noses everywhere.

And in buying he was still more at a disadvantage.  He had grown nervous in the auction-room; he never knew what to do there, and when he did it, it was generally wrong.  He would let himself be outbidden where Keith would have carried all before him by a superb if reckless persistence.

But if business was at its worst in the second-hand department, in the front shop there was a sense of a sadder and more personal desolation.  Rickman’s was no longer sought after.  It had ceased to be the rendezvous of affable young men from Fleet Street and the Temple.  The customers who came nowadays were of another sort, and the tone of the business was changing for the worse.  The spirit, that something illuminating, intimate, and immortal, had perished from the place.

At first Isaac had not been able to take its departure seriously.  He had never really grasped the ground of that disagreement with his son; he had put it all down to “some nonsense about a woman”; and certain hints dropped by Pilkington supported him in that belief.  Keith, he had said to himself, would come back when his belly pinched him.  Every day he looked to see him crawling through the big swinging doors on that empty belly.  When he did it, Isaac meant to take him back instantly, unquestioned, unreproved and unreproached.  His triumph would be so complete that he could afford that magnanimity.  But Keith had not come back; he had never put his nose inside the shop from that day to this.  He called to see his father now and again on a Sunday (for Isaac no longer refused to admit him into his house); and then, as if in obedience to the holy conventions that ruled in the little villa at Ilford in Essex, no allusion