Six days, and three days before that, nine days in all; and it was as if he had known that face all his life; he could not conceive a time when he had not known it. As for the things he had known, horrible, curious and incredible things, such as Rickman's, Mrs. Downey's, St. Pancras Church, and the editor of _The Museion_ (whose last letter he had left unanswered), they belonged to an infinitely remote and unimaginable past. It seemed the entirely obvious and natural thing that he should be sitting there alone with Lucia Harden. He was never very far from her. The east window looked across the courtyard to the window of her drawing-room; he could see her there, sitting in the lamp-light; he could hear the music that she made. Her bedroom was above the library; it was pleasant to him to know that when she left him it was to sleep there overhead. The deep quiet of his passion had drawn him again into his dream. And then all of a sudden, he woke up and broke the silence. It was ten o'clock on Saturday evening. Lucia had shifted the shade of the lamp. From where he sat her face was in twilight and her body in darkness. He had got up to put a book into its place, when he saw her leaning back and covering her eyes with her hand. The sight was too much for him. He came up and stood beside her. "Miss Harden, I don't like this. I--I can't stand it any longer." She looked up. She had been unaware of Mr. Rickman for the last hour, and certainly did not expect to find him there. "What is it that you can't stand?" "To see you working from morning to night. It--it isn't right, you know. You're paying me for this, and doing the half of it yourself." "I'm not doing a quarter of it. You forget that you're working three times as fast as I can." "And you forget that you're working three times as hard." "No. I'm leaving the hard work to you." "I wish you'd leave it all to me." "In that case we should never have finished," said the lady. He smiled. "Perhaps not. At any rate you've worked so hard that I can finish it now by myself." She looked round the room. Undisguised fatigue was in the look. What they had done was nothing to what they had yet to do. "You can't," she said. "I can. Easily. I miscalculated the time it would take." She said nothing, for she knew that he had lied. His miscalculation was all the other way. She bent again over her work. It was all that he could do not to lift her arms gently but firmly from the table, to take away her pen and ink, and put out her lamp. He would have liked to have done some violence to the catalogue. "I say, you know, you'll make yourself ill. You're burning the candle at both ends. May I suggest that the game isn't worth the candle?" "Have you very much more to do?" "About two hours' work. Would it be impertinent to say that I could do it better by myself?" She looked at her watch and ignored his last question. "You can't do two hours' work. It's twenty minutes past your time already."