But the historian, so yielding in other respects, continued his intimacies with the tramps, sometimes even leaving his work if he chanced to see an interesting-looking wanderer slouching past the Green Dragon. Joan had become accustomed to these interruptions. She just sat waiting patiently until Hieronymus came back, and plunged once more into the History of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the Attitude of the Foreign Powers to each other during the latter years of Henry VIII.
"I'm a troublesome fellow," he would say to her sometimes, "and you are very patient with me. In fact, you're a regular little brick of a secretary."
Then she would flush with pleasure to hear his words of praise. But he never noticed that, and never thought he was leading her further and further away from her surroundings and ties, and putting great distances between herself and the exciseman.
So little did he guess it that one day he even ventured to joke with her. He had been talking to her about John Richard Green, the historian, and he asked her whether she had read "A Short History of the English People." She told him she had never read it.
"Oh, you ought to have that book," he said; and he immediately thought that he would buy it for her. Then he remembered the exciseman's library, and judged that it would be better to let him buy it for her.
"I hear you have a very devoted admirer in the exciseman," Hieronymus said slyly.
"How do you know that?" Joan said sharply.
"Oh," he answered, "I was told." But he saw that his volcanic little companion was not too pleased; and so he began talking about John Richard Green. He told her about the man himself, his work, his suffering, his personality. He told her how the young men at Oxford were advised to travel on the Continent to expand their minds, and if they could not afford this advantage after their university career, then they were to read John Richard Green. He told her, too, of his grave at Mentone, with the simple words, "He died learning."
Thus he would talk to her, taking her always into a new world of interest. Then she was in an enchanted kingdom, and he was the magician.
It was a world in which agriculture and dairy-farming and all the other wearinesses of her everyday life had no part. Some people might think it was but a poor enchanted realm which he conjured up for her pleasure. But enchantment, like every other emotion, is but relative after all. Some little fragment of intellectuality had been Joan's idea of enchantment. And now it had come to her in a way altogether unexpected, and in a measure beyond all her calculations. It had come to her, bringing with it something else.