“Oh, yes, please do—and very carefully, please, so nobody can guess what it is.”
The young man was very clever about this, and when he emerged from the back of the shop he had with him a parcel that might easily have been a ship or a railway train. Jeremy paid his money, climbed down from his stool, then held out his hand.
“Good-bye,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll come again one day and look at the other things in your shop.”
“Please do,” said the young man, bowing.
He went out, the little bell tinkling gaily behind him, and there, coming at that very moment out of the hotel, was Miss Jones.
II
We all know the truth of the familiar proverb that “Distance lends enchantment to the view,” and it was never more true of anything in the world than of parcels.
All the way back in the ’bus the book grew and grew in magnificence simply because Jeremy could not see it. He clutched the parcel tightly on his knees and resisted all Miss Jones’s attempts to discover its contents. Back in the rectory, he rushed up to his bedroom, locked the door, and then, with trembling fingers, undid the paper.
The first glimpse of “Robinson Crusoe and the Footmark on the Sand” thrilled him so that the white-washed walls of his room faded away and the thin pale evening glow passed into a sky of burning blue, and a scarlet cockatoo flew screaming above his head and the sand lay hot and sugar-brown at his feet. Mystery was there—the footprint in the sand, and Crusoe with his shaggy beard and peaked hat, staring. . . .
Feverishly his fingers turned the pages, and picture after picture opened for his delight. He had never before seen a book with so many pictures, pictures so bright and yet so true, pictures so real that you could almost touch the trees and the figures and Crusoe’s hatchet. He knelt then on the floor, the book spread out upon the bed, so deeply absorbed that it was with a terrific jolt that he heard the banging on the door and Mary’s voice: