“Oh—­”

“She’s been having a grand turn-out while you were away.”

“The deuce she has—­”

“Oh you needn’t be frightened.  Nobody’s touched your precious books but me.  I wouldn’t let them.”

“Why wouldn’t you let them?”

“Be-cause—­Oh, I say, it’s six o’clock; are you going to stay?”

“Perhaps.  Why?”

“Because I’d only one more shelf to dust and then I’d ’ave finished.  I—­I’m in rather a hurry.”

“Why won’t you stay and dust it now?”

“Well—­you know—­” She took one step inside the room timidly, then another, and stood still.

“Is it me you’re afraid of?  I’ll sit outside, on the stairs, if you’d rather.”

“How silly!” She removed an invisible atom of dust from a chair as she spoke, as much as to say she was inspired solely by the instinct of order.

The diminutive smile played about the corners of her mouth.  “Miss Roots said I’d better not meddle with your books.”

“Did she?  Then Miss Roots is a beast.”

“She seemed to think I didn’t know how to dust them.”

“Perhaps she’s right.  I say, suppose you let me see.”

And Flossie, willingly cajoled, began again, and, as he saw with horror, on his hoarded relics of the Harden library.  “No, Flossie,” he said, with a queer change in his voice.  “Not those.”  But Flossie’s fingers moved along their tops with a delicacy born of the incessant manipulation of bank notes.  All the same, she did do it wrong, for she dusted towards the backs instead of away from them.  But he hadn’t the heart to correct her.  He watched a moment; then he pretended to be looking for the book he had pretended he wanted to find, then he sat down and pretended to write a letter whilst Flossie went on dusting, skilfully, delicately.  She even managed to get through ten volumes of his own Bekker’s Plato without damage to the beautiful but perishing Russia leather.  That made it all the more singular that the back of the eleventh volume should come off suddenly with a rip.

She gave a little cry of dismay.  He looked up, and she came to him holding the book in one hand and its back in the other.  She really was a little frightened.  “Look,” she said, “I didn’t think it would have gone and done like that.”

“Oh, I say, Flossie—­”

“I’m orf’ly sorry.”  Her mouth dropped, not unbecomingly; her eyes were so liquid that he could have sworn they had tears in them.  She looked more than ever like an unhappy child, standing beside him in her long straight overall.  “And I wouldn’t let anybody look at them but me.”

“Why wouldn’t you?  I’ve asked you that before, Flossie—­why wouldn’t you?” He took the book and its mutilated fragment from her, and held both her hands in his.

“Because I knew you were fond enough of them.”

“And is there anything I wasn’t fond enough of—­do you think?”