"Yes, that's what I make it. It doesn't rhyme, but I expect Maria was very pleased. Do you think they were studying with a stern tutor, and he wrote that and pushed it over to her when no one was looking? It's an odd thing to have written in a Natural History book. There's something more on another page—but it doesn't make sense:
"I am true rew Hebrew—CXIX—101."
"I expect he was just trying a pen. Come, the librarian has his scholarly eye on you."
"I should like to look through all the old books and find out all the names people have written and make stories about them," she said, and he received the curious impression that she was talking against time; there was about her a sort of hanging back from the needful movement of departure. He picked the books up and carried them to the counter, she following, and they walked in silence down the gallery hung with Wouvermans and his everlasting gray horse.
"Let's go into the Hall," he said. So they turned under the arch and went into the beautiful great vaulted Guildhall, where the giants Gog and Magog occupy the gallery, and little human people can sit below on stone benches against the wall, and gaze on the monuments of the elder and the younger Pitt, and talk at long leisure, undisturbed and undisturbing, which is not the case in the Library, as Edward pointed out.
"Now, then," he began.
"Yes," she said, hurriedly. "Something will have to be done about Aunt Alice."
"Yes. But what?"
"I don't know." She turned and leaned one hand on the stone seat so that she faced him. "You do believe that I don't regret coming away? I think it would have been splendid to have gone on—like yesterday—but you see it's impossible."