"Let us hope not, since you want to make a clean sweep of them."
"I'd make a clean sweep of myself if I stood in my own light. Anything for a good view. But I'm afraid it's too late." His tone dropped from the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest. "We've done our work, and it can't be undone. We've given Nature a human voice, and now we shall never—never hear anything else."
"That's rather dreadful; I wish you hadn't."
"Oh, no, you don't. It's not the human voice you draw the line at—it's the Cockney accent."
Lucia's smile flickered and went out, extinguished by the waves of her blush. She was not prepared to have her thoughts read—and read aloud to her—in this way; and that particular thought was one she would have preferred him not to read.
"I daresay Keats had a Cockney accent, if we did but know; and I daresay a good many people never heard anything else."
"I'm afraid you'd have heard it yourself, Miss Harden, if you'd met him."
"Possibly. It isn't what I should have remembered him by, though. That reminds me. I came upon a poem—a sonnet—of yours—if it was yours—this morning. It was lying on the library floor. You will find it under the bronze Pallas on the table."
Mr. Rickman stooped, picked up a sod and examined it carefully.
"Thank you very much. It was mine. I was afraid it was lost."