They were English novels by a Miss Pickering, long since forgotten, while less worthy ones are remembered.
"We'll walk up after supper and change them," continued Cousin Jennie.
But visitors came in shortly afterward to stay to supper. People were not specially invited then; and the hostess did not expect to prepare a feast on ordinary occasions. So Jennie said Hanny might go up alone, if she didn't mind.
She started gladly, yet a sense of diffidence oppressed her as she stood at the door, a half guilty consciousness, as if she had no right to the secret Mrs. Clemm was trying so assiduously to hide.
The poet was pacing up and down the room; but his pallid face and strange, shining eyes seemed looking out from some other world. Mrs. Clemm sat by the window with a magazine in her hand.
Hanny preferred her request timidly.
"Oh, come in and hunt them up. Your cousin is quite welcome to anything. Then there are some upstairs, though I brought down that pile over in the corner this very morning."
The corner looked attractive. Hanny went thither, and knelt down on the checked matting. There were two books of engravings containing portraits of famous people, some old volumes of verse, some new ones, and magazines.
The volumes she wanted were not among them. But she exhumed something else that made her forget the slight, nervous man pacing up and down, and the woman at the window. Turning the leaves of an old novel that had lost one cover, she came across the name of one of her heroes, "Richard of the Lion Heart." She had a passion, just then, for English history. And there was Bulwer's "White Rose of England," in paper covers with a Harper imprint.
"Could I take these beside?" she asked, with some hesitation.