"I don't know whether you'll find what you want," he said; "but it's all I know of it." He looked at Celia as he spoke, and added, "Oh, perhaps this young lady can help you; she does antiquarian work."
The young man coloured and raised his eyes appealingly to Celia.
"Oh, I couldn't trouble you," he said, humbly.
"What is it?" she asked. "I shall be glad to help you, if I can."
He took up some slips of paper on which were "pulled" impressions of blocks, and Celia saw that they were pictures of ruined castles, abbeys, and similar buildings.
"This is the trouble," said the young man. "The man I work for—he's the proprietor of the Youth's Only Companion—is a rum sort of chap, and fancies he has ideas. One of them was to buy up a lot of old blocks in Germany; these are they, and he's given me the job of writing them up, fitting them with descriptive letterpress—history, anecdote, that kind of thing, you know."
"That should not be very difficult," Celia remarked.
"Oh, no!" he assented; "but"—he grinned, and his whole face lit up with boyish humour—"the beastly things have no names to them! See? I've tried to hunt them up in all the old county histories, and books of that kind; but I've succeeded in getting only two or three, and there's a couple of dozen of the wretched things. I've driven the superintendent pretty nearly mad, and—But look here, I don't want to drive you mad, too. You mustn't let me bother you about it; you've got your own work to do."
"That's all right," said Celia, bending over the slips with the literary frown on her young face. "Oh, I can recognize some of them; that's Pevensey Castle; and that's Knowle House, before it was rebuilt; and, surely, this one is meant for Battle Abbey."
"I say, how clever you are!" he exclaimed, gazing at her with admiration.