Mrs. Barbour rose, a little flustered, as he came into the room, and thrust some family mending behind the cushion of her basket chair. Paul saw at once that she was of his own caste, and you never would have guessed how his heart went out to her. The heart was under disgrace just then, and a strict embargo laid upon its impulses.
"I am so pleased to meet you at last," said Mrs. Barbour, when the first civilities were over, "and so interested to hear you are a literary man. My husband wrote a good deal during his life."
Fenella was revolving, slowly, on the hearthrug before the mirror.
"Paul doesn't want to hear about books, mother," she said; "he's been reading stodge all day."
But Mrs. Barbour was already searching the shabby book-shelves, packed tight with tattered exercise-books, coverless magazines, broken cardboard boxes, and a host of other things for which book-shelves were never intended.
"My husband had a very fine library at one time," the widow went on, as she rummaged, "but most of the best books are upstairs."
"With our lodgers," Fenella further explained. "We're very proud of our 'paying jests'; aren't we, mummy. We've had them for years—and years—and years." She let her voice die away, and stretched out her arms slowly, indicating, indeed, a considerable time vista. "What an actress!" thought Paul, watching her.
"Here's one," said her mother at last, dusting a slim volume in a brown cloth binding. "Where can all your father's books have got to, Nelly?"
Ingram took the book from her hand. Its pages had never been cut, and it exhaled the forlorn odor of the presentation copy. Its strange title attracted him—
"Climatic Influences Upon the Reformation. A lecture delivered at Wells before the United Diocesan Congress, 18—. By the Honble. and Revd. Nigel Kedo Barbour, M. A."