n't just treat it as a commercial language. There's a lot of fine
stuff in Spanish literature." He hesitated, feeling uncertain as to
whether "Celestina" or "Juan de Ruiz" were really suitable for a young
girl. "Saint Teresa, you know," he suggested, with the air of one who
had landed on his feet.

"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.

He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
long scrolls.

Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
your chop, if you'll wait."

"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.

She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was
watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
door. Because the thing that he had meant to