dy,
pressing the little hand in both her own.

Tea was soon ready. Mrs. Grail talked with pleasant continuousness, as
usual. She had fallen upon reminiscences, and spoke of Lambeth as she
had known it when a girl; it was her birthplace, and through life she
had never strayed far away. She regarded the growth of population, the
crowding of mean houses where open spaces used to be, the whole change
of times in fact, as deplorable. One would have fancied from her
descriptions that the Lambeth of sixty years ago was a delightful
rustic village.

After tea Thyrza resumed the low chair and folded her hands, full of
contentment. Mrs. Grail took the tea-things from the room and was
absent about a quarter of an hour. Thyrza, left alone with the man who
for her embodied so many mysteries, let her eyes stray over the
bookshelves. She felt it very unlikely that any book there would be
within the compass of her understanding; doubtless they dealt with the
secrets of learning--the strange, high things for which her awed
imagination had no name. Gilbert had seated himself in a shadowed
corner; his face was bent downwards. Just when Thyrza was about to put
some timid question with regard to the books, he looked at her and said:

'Do you ever go to Westminster Abbey?'

The intellectual hunger of his face was softened; he did not smile, but
kept a mild gravity of expression which showed that he had a pleasure
in the girl's proximity. When he had spoken he stroked his forehead
with the tips of his fingers, a nervous action.

'I've never been inside,' Thyrza made answer. 'What is there to see?'

'It's the place, you know, where great men have been buried for
hundreds of years. I should like, if I could, to spend a little time
there every day.'

'Can you see the graves?' Thyrza asked.

'Yes, many. And on the stones you read who they were that lie there.
There are the graves of kings, and of men much greater than kings.'

'Greater than kings! Who were they, Mr. Grail?'

She had rested her elbow on the arm of the chair, and her fingers just
touched her chin. She regarded him with a gaze of deep curiosity.

'Men who wrote books,' he answered, with a slight smile.

Thyrza dropped her eyes. In her thought of books it had never occurred
to her that any special interest could attach to the people who wrote
them; indeed, she had perhaps never asked herself how printed matter
came into existence. Even among the crowd of average readers