s."

"What things?"

"Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious. He doesn't waste
time. He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other;
which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous
so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my
eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some
horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance.
Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?"

"What a shame."

"Yes. I'm afraid he'll have to do a little re-copying."

"Oh, Kitty, why couldn't you leave the poor thing in peace?"

"There wasn't any peace to leave him in. Really, you'd have thought
that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the
Act. He couldn't have been more excited if I'd caught him in his bath.
Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty."

"Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you. You might have had the
decency to go away."

"There wouldn't have been any decency in going away. Flight would have
argued that I shared the theory of his guilt. I stayed where I was for
two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away--to the other end
of the room."

"You should have gone away altogether."

"Why? The library is big enough for two. It's so big that you could
take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of
it at the other. I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even
hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him
at his."

"In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly
could."

"I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything. I did
it on purpose. I am nothing if not subtle. _You_ would have crushed
him with a delicate and ladylike retreat; _I_ left him as happy as he
could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue."

"And then?"

"Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go. But before I went I
made another discovery. You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to
look at. Adieu, my exclusive one."

CHAPTER XIX

The chronicler who recorded that no woman had ever inherited the
Harden Library contented himself with the bare statement of the fact.
It was not his business to search into its causes, which belonged to
the obscurer regions of psychology. Sir Joseph Harden and those
book-lovers who went before him had the incurable defects of their
qualities. Hereditary instin