"Because I'd only one more shelf to dust and then I'd 'ave finished.
I--I'm in rather a hurry."

"Why won't you stay and dust it now?"

"Well--you know--" She took one step inside the room timidly, then
another, and stood still.

"Is it me you're afraid of? I'll sit outside, on the stairs, if you'd
rather."

"How silly!" She removed an invisible atom of dust from a chair as she
spoke, as much as to say she was inspired solely by the instinct of
order.

The diminutive smile played about the corners of her mouth. "Miss
Roots said I'd better not meddle with your books."

"Did she? Then Miss Roots is a beast."

"She seemed to think I didn't know how to dust them."

"Perhaps she's right. I say, suppose you let me see."

And Flossie, willingly cajoled, began again, and, as he saw with
horror, on his hoarded relics of the Harden library. "No, Flossie," he
said, with a queer change in his voice. "Not those." But Flossie's
fingers moved along their tops with a delicacy born of the incessant
manipulation of bank notes. All the same, she did do it wrong, for she
dusted towards the backs instead of away from them. But he hadn't the
heart to correct her. He watched a moment; then he pretended to be
looking for the book he had pretended he wanted to find, then he sat
down and pretended to write a letter whilst Flossie went on dusting,
skilfully, delicately. She even managed to get through ten volumes of
his own Bekker's Plato without damage to the beautiful but perishing
Russia leather. That made it all the more singular that the back of
the eleventh volume should come off suddenly with a rip.

She gave a little cry of dismay. He looked up, and she came to him
holding the book in one hand and its back in the other. She really was
a little frightened. "Look," she said, "I didn't think it would have
gone and done like that."

"Oh, I say, Flossie--"

"I'm orf'ly sorry." Her mouth dropped, not unbecomingly; her eyes were
so liquid that he could have sworn they had tears in them. She looked
more than ever like an unhappy child, standing beside him in her long
straight overall. "And I wouldn't let anybody look at them but me."

"Why wouldn't you? I've asked you that before, Flossie--why wouldn't
you?" He took the book and its mutilated fragment from her, and held
both her hands in his.

"Because I knew you were fond enough of _them_."

"And is there anything I wasn't fond enough of--do you think?"

"I don't think; I