She felt a little pang of self-reproach at the sight of him.  There was something pathetic in his attitude, in his bowed head and spread elbows, the whole assiduous and devoted figure.  How hard he was working, with what a surprising speed in his slender nervous hands.  She had not meant him to give up the whole of his three days’ holiday to her, and she really could not take his Easter Sunday, poor little man.  So, with that courtesy which was Mr. Rickman’s admiration and despair, she insisted on restoring it to him, and earnestly advised his spending it in the open air.  In the evening he could have the library to himself, to read or write or rest in; he would, she thought, be more comfortable there than in the inn.  Mr. Rickman admitted that he would like to have a walk to stretch his legs a bit, and as she opened the south window she had a back view of him stretching them across the lawn.  He walked as rapidly as he wrote, holding his head very high in the air.  He wore a light grey suit and a new straw hat with a dull olive green ribbon on it, poor dear.  She was glad that it was a fine day for the hat.

She watched him till the beech-tree hid him from her sight; then she opened the west windows, and the south wind that she had just let in tried to rush out again by them, and in its passage it lifted up the leaves of Mr. Rickman’s catalogue and sent them flying.  The last of them, escaping playfully from her grasp, careered across the room and hid itself under a window curtain.  Stooping to recover it, she came upon a long slip of paper printed on one side.  It was signed S.K.R., and Savage Keith Rickman was the name she had seen on Mr. Rickman’s card.  The headline, Helen in Leuce, drew her up with a little shock of recognition.  The title was familiar, so was the motto from Euripides,

[Greek:  su Dios ephus, o HElena thugater,]

and she read,

    The wonder and the curse of friend and foe,
        She watched the ranks of battle cloud and shine,
        And heard, Achilles, that great voice of thine,
    That thundered in the trenches far below.

    Tears upon tears, woe upon mortal woe,
        Follow her feet and funeral fire on fire,
        While she, that phantom of the heart’s desire,
    Flies thither, where all dreams and phantoms go.

    Oh Strength unconquerable, Achilles!  Thee
        She follows far into the shadeless land
        Of Leuce, girdled by the gleaming sand,
    Amidst the calm of an enchanted sea,
        Where, children of the Immortals, hand in hand,
    Ye share one golden immortality.

It was a voice from the sad modern world she knew so well, and in spite of its form (which was a little too neo-classic and conventional to please her) she felt it to be a cry from the heart of a living man.  That man she had identified with the boy her grandfather had found, years ago, in a City bookshop.  There had been no room for doubt on that point when she saw him in the flush of his intellectual passion, bursting so joyously, so preposterously, into Greek.  He had, therefore, already a certain claim on her attention.  Besides, he seemed to be undergoing some incomprehensible struggle which she conceived to be of a moral nature, and she had been sorry for him on that account.