But there was something very transfiguring in the firelight of his bedroom hearth.  As he lay in it, enjoying the pure sweet foretaste of domestic felicity, it was as if he saw more clearly into himself and her and the life that would so soon make them one.  If it was not the best life, he told himself that of its kind it would be very good.  He had no doubt now that Flossie loved him.  He was led to this certainty by the maternal quality in her present dealings with him, when perhaps it should have warned him rather that these cares were not for him.

Flossie had somewhat elaborated her dream.  Bearing the fascinating name of Muriel Maud, it had grown softer and rosier than ever.  She could not any longer deny its mysterious association with Keith Rickman, though she would have died rather than that Keith should have suspected it.  And now as she sat mending Keith’s socks her fancy all the time was busy fashioning delicious garments for her dream.  Flossie never pursued her vision of Muriel Maud beyond the period of enchanting infancy; when it outgrew the tender folly of those garments, it was dismissed from Flossie’s fancy with unmaternal harshness.  Therefore it appeared eternally innocent and young, mortal in a delicate immortality.  In fact, viewing her life too in the light of the bedroom firelight, Flossie was herself deceived.

They were both blissfully unaware that Nature cares nothing about love, but was bent upon using them for the only end she does care about, the end that gives to love the illusion of its own eternity.

But Maddox saw through it in a minute.  It was in the earlier stages of the poet’s illness, and Maddox had happened to put his head into Rickman’s room at the moment when Flossie, compelled by Mrs. Downey, was helping to put a stinging mustard plaster on his chest.  They shrieked, and Maddox instantly withdrew.

He painted the scene afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic colours of his Celtic fancy.  “Talk of Samson among the Philistines, it’s nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d——­d boarding-house.  There was a woman on each side of his bed.  They’d got him down on it; they were pinning the poor little chap in his blankets.  I could just see Ricky-ticky’s face between their shoulders; it was very red; and I shall never forget the expression on it, never.  The agony, Rankin, the hopeless, unutterable agony.”

“What were they doing to him?”

“I couldn’t see properly.  But I think they were cutting his hair off.”

He declared later that he had distinctly heard the squeaking of that young Delilah’s scissors.  “We’re not told whether Delilah was Samson’s wife,” said he.  “But the Scriptures were never wrong on a point of human nature.”

At which Rankin looked depressed; for he too was thinking of getting married; though, as Maddox reminded him for his comfort, not to Miss Flossie Walker.

“Is our Ricky-ticky,” urged Rankin, “the man to show wisdom in choosing a wife?”