"It's Miss Basingstoke," she said, thinking of the hotel, "and I've never met an American that I didn't like."
He made her a ceremonious and old-fashioned bow. "Inscrutable are the ways of fate," he said. "Only this morning I was angry because the chambermaid at my inn in Birmingham destroyed my rubbing of the grave inscription, and I had to come to Stratford to get another. Yes, I could have written, but it was so near, and I shall soon be chained to an office desk—and now, in this of all spots, I meet youth and beauty and sympathy and hospitality. It is an omen."
"And what," she asked, as they paced down the church, "was the cipher that said there was nothing in the tomb? Or would you rather not talk about your ciphers?"
"I desire nothing better than to talk of them," he answered. "It's the greatest mistake to keep these things secret. We ought all to tell all we know—and if we all did that and put together the little fragment of knowledge we have gathered, we should soon piece together the whole puzzle. The first words I found on the subject are, 'Reader, read all, no corpse lies in this tomb,' and so on, and with the same letters another anagram in Latin, beginning 'Lector intra sepulcho jacet nullum cadaver.' I'll show you how I got it when we're within reach of a table and light."
They lingered a moment on the churchyard terrace where the willows overhang the Avon and the swans move up and down like white-sailed ships.
"How hospitable we're getting," she said to Edward that night when their guest had gone to his humbler inn—"two visitors in one day!"
"Katherine," he said, just for the pleasure of saying it, for they two were alone, so he could not have been speaking to any one else—"Katherine, that man's ciphers are wonderful. And what a gift of the gods—to possess an interest that can never fail and that costs nothing for its indulgence, not like postage-stamps or orchids or politics or racing!"
"The ciphers were wonderful," she said. "I had no idea such things were possible. I understood quite a lot," she added, a little defiantly. "But it's rather hateful to think of his being chained to a desk doing work that isn't his work."
"That, or something like it, is the lot of most people," he said, "but it needn't be his lot. It's for you to say. I can very well afford a small endowment for research, if you say so."
"But why must I decide?"