“Can’t read any more,” he said. “But anyhow one day, long before the cathedral was built, Publius Aelius set that up, because the gods had been good to him. What a lot of jolly things there are! And some fellows go mooning along never looking at anything.”
“I’m afraid you mean me,” suggested David modestly.
Maddox looked up at him over his shoulder.
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “And there’s a bit of an arch. Perhaps that came from the temple where P. Aelius put his altar.”
Maddox asked for (and was given) another look at the Keats before he left, and proposed to David that he should walk with him as far as the old palace.
“Best afternoon I’ve spent for ages,” said the Idol, as they parted. “I wish I wasn’t going away to-morrow, or I should ask to be allowed to come again. Anyhow, we meet at Adams’s in September.”
A haunting doubt had been present in David’s mind at intervals all that heavenly afternoon. Now it had to find expression.
“I say, I hope it hasn’t been awful cheek of me to have asked you to have tea, and all that?” he said.
“I can stand lots of that sort of cheek,” said the other.