‘Well, here he is,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Do you mean to say that you’re It?—the clergyman, I mean,—I beg your pardon,’ said Caroline; and the man with the trowel said, ‘At your service.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Caroline again, very red as to her ears. ‘I thought you were a working man.’
‘So I am, thank God,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘You see we haven’t much money to spare. The parish is so poor. So we do any little repairs ourselves. Did you ever set a stone? It’s awfully jolly. The mortar goes on so nicely, and squeezes out pleasantly. Like to try?’ he asked Charles.
Of course they all liked to try. And it was not till each had laid a stone and patted it into place, and scraped off the mortar, and got thoroughly dusty and dirty and comfortable, that any one remembered why they had come.
‘Oh, this?’ said the clergyman—for so I must call him, though anything less clergyman-like than he looked in his mortar-stained flannels and blue blazer you can’t imagine. ‘It looks interesting. Latin,’ he said, opening it carefully, for his hands were very dirty.
‘Yes,’ said Charles with modest pride. ‘I told them it was. I saw rara and quam and apud.’
‘Quite so,’ said the clergyman; ‘rara, quam, and apud. Words of Power.’
‘Oh, do you know about Words of Power?’
‘Rather! Do you?’