Through the rain-drenched windows a cold white light entered, flooding the stack room with its iron tiers of slumbering volumes, and, here at the barrier-like counter, illumining faintly the rebellious brown hair of the girl who, with pen in hand, bent over the pile of catalogue cards. The library was very still, so still that the sibilation of the moving pen sounded portentously loud. Now and then the rustle of a turning leaf or the scraping of feet on the floor came from around the corner of the arched doorway where sat a solitary occupant of the reading room. Save for these two the library was deserted. The hands of the clock above the commemorative tablet pointed to a quarter past twelve and the stack-boy and the assistant librarian had both gone to their luncheons.
A more prolonged scraping of feet, followed by the sound of a moving chair, caused the girl at the desk to raise her head and pause at her work. A little frown of annoyance gathered and then gave place to a smile of humorous resignation as footfalls sounded on the echoing silence. From the reading room emerged a tall, thin youth of about twenty, a youth with a pale, cadaverous face lighted by a pair of patient, contemplative brown eyes which looked strangely incongruous and out of place. He carried two books which he laid apologetically on the counter.
“Excuse me, Miss Hoyt,” he said gently.
“Yes, Mr. Winkley?” she asked, looking up.
“I am very sorry to trouble you, but could you let me have Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy?”
“Have—What did you say, please?” she asked startledly.
“Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, please,” he repeated in his patient voice. She turned hurriedly and disappeared into the stack room. Once out of sight she leaned against one of the cases and laughed silently and hysterically.
“Oh,” she thought, “if he doesn’t stop it and go away I shall have to—to—I shall go crazy!”