hung it on a plaster bust of Minerva, opened the shutters, leaned out
to see if there were any eggs in the swallow's nest above one of the
windows, and finally, seating herself behind the desk, drew out a
roll of cotton lace and a steel crochet hook. She was not an expert
workwoman, and it had taken her many weeks to make the half-yard
of narrow lace which she kept wound about the buckram back of a
disintegrated copy of "The Lamplighter." But there was no other way of
getting any lace to trim her summer blouse, and since Ally Hawes, the
poorest girl in the village, had shown herself in church with enviable
transparencies about the shoulders, Charity's hook had travelled faster.
She unrolled the lace, dug the hook into a loop, and bent to the task
with furrowed brows.

Suddenly the door opened, and before she had raised her eyes she knew
that the young man she had seen going in at the Hatchard gate had
entered the library.

Without taking any notice of her he began to move slowly about the
long vault-like room, his hands behind his back, his short-sighted eyes
peering up and down the rows of rusty bindings. At length he reached the
desk and stood before her.

"Have you a card-catalogue?" he asked in a pleasant abrupt voice; and
the oddness of the question caused her to drop her work.

"A WHAT?"

"Why, you know----" He broke off, and she became conscious that he was
looking at her for the first time, having apparently, on his entrance,
included her in his general short-sighted survey as part of the