He pointed out to her the touches that rendered it so dear to those who value art in stone. He knew them, every one, the history and the dates, and the three stags' heads on a shield; there were broad folios in the smoky room at home, filled with every detail, Iden himself had subscribed forty pounds to the cost of illustrating one of them. Every scholar who visited the Abbey church, called and begged to see the baker's old books.
Iden rubbed his old thumb in the grooves and went outside and hoisted himself, as it were, up from his crooked S position to look at the three stags' heads on the shield on the wall; dim stags' heads that to you, or at least to me, might have been fishes, or Jove's thunderbolts, or anything.
Amaryllis was left standing alone a moment in the porch, the deep shadow within behind her, the curve of the arch over, a fine setting for a portrait. She stood the more upright because of the fire and temper suppressed in her.
Just outside the human letter S—crooked S—clad in sad white-grey miller's garments, its old hat almost falling backwards off its old grey head, gazed up and pointed with its oaken cudgel at the coat of arms. Seven hundred years—the weight of seven hundred years—hung over them both in that old Abbey.
Into that Past he was soon to disappear: she came out to the Future.
Thence he took her to an arched door, nail-studded, in the passage wall, and giving her the key, told her to open it, and stood watching her in triumph, as if it had been the door to some immense treasury. She turned the lock, and he pushed her before him hastily, as if they must snatch so grand an opportunity.
