can."

He took up some slips of paper on which were "pulled" impressions of
blocks, and Celia saw that they were pictures of ruined castles, abbeys,
and similar buildings.

"This is the trouble," said the young man. "The man I work for--he's the
proprietor of the _Youth's Only Companion_--is a rum sort of chap, and
fancies he has ideas. One of them was to buy up a lot of old blocks in
Germany; these are they, and he's given me the job of writing them up,
fitting them with descriptive letterpress--history, anecdote, that kind
of thing, you know."

"That should not be very difficult," Celia remarked.

"Oh, no!" he assented; "but"--he grinned, and his whole face lit up with
boyish humour--"the beastly things have no names to them! See? I've
tried to hunt them up in all the old county histories, and books of that
kind; but I've succeeded in getting only two or three, and there's a
couple of dozen of the wretched things. I've driven the superintendent
pretty nearly mad, and--But look here, I don't want to drive you mad,
too. You mustn't let me bother you about it; you've got your own work to
do."

"That's all right," said Celia, bending over the slips with the literary
frown on her young face. "Oh, I can recognize some of them; that's
Pevensey Castle; and that's Knowle House, before it was rebuilt; and,
surely, this one is meant for Battle Abbey."

"I say, how clever you are!" he exclaimed, gazing at her with
admiration.

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Celia, with a smile; "I just happen to remember
them because I've come across them in the course of my own work. Let us
go over the others."

She turned to his pile of books and, still with knit brows, tried to
find the counterpart of the other pulls; and the young fellow watched
her, his eyes growing thoughtful and something more, as they dwelt upon
her face.

"You mustn't worry any more," he begged her, presently. "You're losing
all your own time; I feel ashamed; I'm most awfully grateful to you."

"Not at all," said Celia. "I'm afraid I've been of very little help to
you; and I don't see that I can do any more----"

"No, no," he said, quickly; "don't take any more trouble. It wouldn't
matter so much if I had plenty of time; but I haven't. You see"--he
coloured--"one doesn't get too well paid for this kind of work, and
can't afford----"

He coloured still more deeply, and his voice dropped below the
regulation whisper in which one is permitted to speak in the Readi