ted,
for the shadow of impending disaster lay black upon her. Medenham's
only thrill came when Cynthia asked for letters or telegrams at the
Green Dragon, and was told there were none. Evidently, Peter Vanrenen
was not a man to create a mountain out of a molehill. Mrs. Leland
might be trusted to smooth away difficulties; perhaps he meant to
await her report confidently and in silence.

But that square of crinkled vellum on which Richard of Holdingham and
Lafford had charted this strange old world of ours as it appeared
during the thirteenth century helped to blow away the mists.

"I never knew before that the Garden of Eden was inside the Arctic
Circle," said the girl, gazing awe-stricken at the symbolic drawings
of the eating of the forbidden fruit and the expulsion of Adam and Eve
from Paradise.

"No later than yesterday I fancied it might have been situated in the
Wye Valley," commented Medenham.

The cast was skillful, but the fish did not rise. Instead, Cynthia
bent nearer to look at Lot's wife, placed _in situ_.

"Too bad there is no word about America," she said irrelevantly.

"Oh, even at that date the United States were on the other side. You
see, Richard was a person of intelligence. He anticipated Galileo by
making the earth round, so he would surely get ahead of Columbus in
guessing at a New World."

They were the only tourists in the cathedral at that early hour, so
the attendant verger tolerated this flippancy.

"In the left-hand corner," he recited, "you see Augustus Caesar
delivering orders for a survey of the world to the philosophers
Nichodoxus, Theodotus, and Polictitus. Near the center you have the
Labyrinth of Crete, the Pyramids of Egypt, the House of Bondage, the
Jews worshiping the Golden Calf----"

"Ah, what a pity we left Mrs. Devar at the post-office--how she would
have appreciated this!" murmured Medenham.

Still Cynthia refused to take the fly.

"May we visit the library?" she asked, dazzling the verger with a
smile in her best manner. "I have heard so much about the books in
chains, and the Four Gospels in Anglo-Saxon characters. Is the volume
really a thousand years old?"

From the Cathedral they wandered into the beautiful grounds of the
Bishop's Palace, where a brass plate, set in a boundary wall, states
in equivocal phrase that "Nell Gwynne, Founder of Chelsea Hospital,
and Mother of the first Duke of St. Albans," was born near the spot
thus marked. Each remembered the i