"No, sir," I said, simply, "none that Mr. Grainger ever told me of."
He let that pass.
"And what do you do here?"
"I show the library to visitors. If any one wishes a particular book, or to look at engravings, I help him to find what he wants." I thought it well to keep up the fiction that he had come as a sight-seer. "If you'd care to go over the place now, sir—"
His hand went up in a majestic waving aside of this courtesy.
"And have you many visitors to the—to the library?"
Though I saw the implication, I managed to elude it.
"Yes, sir, taking one day with another. It depends a little on the weather and the time of year."
"Are they chiefly strangers—or—or do you ever see any one you've—you've seen before?"
His difficulty in phrasing this question made me even more sorry for him than I was already. I decided, both for his sake and my own, to walk up frankly and take the bull by the horns. "They're generally strangers; but sometimes people come whom I know." I looked at him steadily as I continued. "I'll tell you something, sir. Perhaps I ought not to, and it may be betraying a secret; but you might as well know it from me as hear it from some one else." The expression of the face he turned on me was so much that of Jove, whose look could strike a man dead, that I had all I could do to go on. "Mrs. Brokenshire comes to see me."