boot.

While these incidents were still further irritating her, the old Pacha
kept mumbling and muttering to himself, nodding his head and smiling at
each fresh mark of attention, for though he was so independent and
fearless still he appreciated the trouble she took. The mumbling in his
mouth was a sort of purring. Her dutiful spirit had stroked him up to a
pleasant state of electric glow; she felt like a hound in a leash, ready
to burst the bond that held her to his hand. Side by side, and arm in
arm, neither of them understood the other; ninety and sixteen, a strange
couple in the jostling fair.

Iden turned down a passage near the end of the street, and in an instant
the roar of the crowd which had boomed all round them was shut off by
high walls up which it rose and hummed over their heads in the air. They
walked on broad stone flags notched here and there at the edges, for the
rest worn smooth by footsteps (the grave drives such a trade) like
Iden's doorstep, they were in fact tombstones, and the walled passage
brought them to the porch of the Abbey church.

There he stopped, muttering and mumbling, and wiped his forehead with
his vast silk handkerchief. They were no longer incommoded by a crowd,
but now and then folk came by hastening to the fair; lads with favours
in their coats, and blue ribbons in their hats, girls in bright dresses,
chiefly crude colours, who seemed out of accord with the heavy weight as
it were of the great Abbey, the ponderous walls, the quiet gloom of the
narrow space, and the shadows that lurked behind the buttresses.

The aged man muttered and mumbled about the porch and took Amaryllis
under it, making her look up at the groining, and note the spring of the
arch, which formed a sort of carved crown over them. It was a fine old
porch, deep and high, in some things reminding you of the porches that
are to be seen in Spain; stone made to give a pleasant shade like trees,
so cut and worked as to be soft to the eye.

He pointed out to her the touches that rendered it so dear to those who
value art in stone. He knew them, every one, the history and the dates,
and the three stags' heads on a shield; there were broad folios in the
smoky room at home, filled with every detail, Iden himself had
subscribed forty pounds to the cost of illustrating one of them. Every
scholar who visited the Abbey church, called and begged to see the
baker's old books.

Iden rubbed his old thumb in the grooves