It was not easy to find out. The title-page was missing, and quam, apud, and rara, though quite all right in their way, gave but little clue to what the book was about.
‘I wish we’d some one we could ask,’ said Charles. ‘I don’t suppose the Wilmington knows any Latin. I don’t suppose she knows even apud and quam and rara. If we had the Murdstone chap handy he could tell us, I suppose.’
‘I’m glad we haven’t,’ Charlotte said. ‘I don’t suppose he’d tell us. And he’d take it away. I say. I suppose there’s a church somewhere near. And a clergyman. He’d know.’
‘Of course he would,’ Caroline said with returning brightness. ‘Let’s go and ask him.’
Half an hour later the children, coming down a deep banked lane, saw before them the grey tower of the church, with elm-trees round it, standing among old gravestones and long grass.
A white faced house stood on the other side of the churchyard.
‘I suppose the clergyman lives there,’ said Caroline. ‘Please,’ she said to a pleasant-looking hook-nosed man who was mending the churchyard wall, and whistling ‘Blow away the morning dew’ as he slapped on the mortar and trimmed off the edges with a diamond-shaped trowel, ‘please, does the clergyman live in that house?’
‘He does,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘Do you want him?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Caroline.