‘Did you come by the back way?’ Tarrant asked, when he had bitten his lips for a sulky minute.
‘Yes, as you told me.’
He said he would walk with her into Chancery Lane; there could be no risk in it.
‘You shall go out first. Any one passing will suppose you had business with the solicitor underneath. I’ll overtake you at Southampton Buildings.’
Impatient to be gone, she lingered minute after minute, and broke hurriedly from his restraining arms at last. The second outer door, which Tarrant had closed on her entrance, surprised her by its prison-like massiveness. In the wooden staircase she stopped timidly, but at the exit her eyes turned to an inscription above, which she had just glanced at when arriving: Surrexit e flammis, and a date. Nancy had no Latin, but guessed an interpretation from the last word. Through the little court, with its leafy plane-trees and white-worn cobble-stones, she walked with bent head, hearing the roar of Holborn through the front archway, and breathing more freely when she gained the quiet garden at the back of the Inn.
Tarrant’s step sounded behind her. Looking up she asked the meaning of the inscription she had seen.
‘You don’t know Latin? Well, why should you? Surrexit e flammis, “It rose again from the flames.”
‘I thought it might be something like that. You will be patient with my ignorance?’
A strange word upon Nancy’s lips. No mortal ere this had heard her confess to ignorance.
‘But you know the modern languages?’ said Tarrant, smiling.