“Please let me in!” she called out in her clear young voice, that echoed back to her from the vaulted chamber.

Again she heard the shuffling footsteps, which this time came towards her, and a moment afterwards the door opened and the librarian’s ghastly face was close before her.  She drew back a little.  She had forgotten that he was so ugly, she thought, or perhaps she would not have cared to see him.  It would have been foolish, moreover, to go away after coming thus far.

“I want to see the library,” she said quietly, after she had made up her mind.  “Will you show it to me?”

“Favorisca, Excellency,” replied Meschini in a broken voice.  He had been frightened by the noise at the door, and the contortion of his face as he tried to smile was hideous to see.  He bowed low, however, and closed the door after she had entered.  Scarcely knowing what he did, he shuffled along by her side while she looked about the library, gazing at the long rows of books, bound all alike, that stretched from end to end of many of the shelves.  The place was new to her, for she had not been in it more than two or three times in her life, and she felt a sort of unexplained awe in the presence of so many thousands of volumes, of so much written and printed wisdom which she could never hope to understand.  She had come with a vague idea that she should find something to read that should be different from the novels she was not allowed to touch.  She realised all at once that she knew nothing of what had been written in all the centuries whose literature was represented in the vast collection.  She hardly knew the names of twenty books out of the hundreds of millions that the world contained.  But she could ask Meschini.  She looked at him again, and his face repelled her.  Nevertheless, she was too kindhearted not to enter into conversation with the lonely man whom she had so rarely seen, but who was one of the oldest members of her father’s household.

“You have spent your life here, have you not?” she asked, for the sake of saying something.

“Nearly thirty years of it,” answered Meschini in a muffled voice.  Her presence tortured him beyond expression.  “That is a long time, and I am not an old man.”

“And are you always alone here?  Do you never go out?  What do you do all day?”

“I work among the books, Excellency.  There are twenty thousand volumes here, enough to occupy a man’s time.”

“Yes—­but how?  Do you have to read them all?” asked Faustina innocently.  “Is that your work?”

“I have read many more than would be believed, for my own pleasure.  But my work is to keep them in order, to see that there is no variation from the catalogue, so that when learned men come to make inquiries they may find what they want.  I have also to take care of all the books, to see that they do not suffer in any way.  They are very valuable.  There is a fortune here.”