"No."
"It's a beautiful place—very quiet, very calm. And the officials are the best chaps I've ever found in any library anywhere. We'll go there. You must want to look up something. Let's see—the dates of the publication of Bacon's works. Write your name in the book—any name you like, so long as it isn't your own; then ask one of the officials to help you, and go and sit at one of the side tables—they're like side chapels in a cathedral—and stay there till I come. You'll be as safe and as secret as if you were in the Bastille. And I'll baffle pursuit and come to you as soon as I can."
"Yes," she said, meekly.
"And don't worry," he urged. "The more I think of it, the more certain I am that it was not the aunt you like who wrote that advertisement—"
He was right. The telegram with which, an hour later, he presented himself at the Guildhall Library ran thus:
I did not write advertisement and I am not specially ill, but I am very anxious. Write at once. Aunt Loo and Aunt Enid are both here. I think they must have inserted the advertisement. A.
"Your Aunt Alice is a sportsman," he said, "to warn you like that."
"I told you she was a darling," she answered—and her whole face had lighted up with relief—"and you are the cleverest person in the world! I should never have thought about its not being her doing, never in a thousand years. You deserve a medal and a statue and a pension."
"I don't deserve more than I've got," said he, "nor half so much. The sun shines again."
She flashed a brilliant smile at him, and pushed a brown book along the table.