unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part
of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer
pause--when for three days his soul would be given back to him. The
only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the
Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed,
the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up
and eager for the day. By the time Keith had got down to breakfast
Isaac had caught the early train that landed him in the City at nine.
Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.

And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on
the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his
assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great
front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and
frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart
swelled with thankfulness and pride. For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer,
too, in his way. There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable
merit and glory of Isaac's dreams was that they had all, or very
nearly all, come true. They were of the sort that can be handed over
the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank. His
latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it
towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola
at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son. Keith, presumably, took
after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the