Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/222

Rh panels showed in the beautiful grey of their own oak. The books had been dusted and put back on the shelves, and the room had been swept and brushed to a fine bare neatness.

"Why, it's the most beautiful room in the house!" said Lucilla.

"Almost it persuades me to be a book-worm," said Dix, and took down a book and then another book. Lucilla also began to take down books—large ones with pictures. In a moment she looked round for someone to share the delights of a book of engravings—romantic pictures of castles and monasteries and ruins, with the wonderful trees and skies of the steel-engraver and the little blurred, round, brown footprints of time.

"Oh, do look at this picture of Lindisfarne—isn't it lovely?" and Mr. Dix came and looked and said it was.

"But look at this," he said, displaying his book—"the lovely little pictures of strange beasts."

Jane and Rochester drifted to the window, whose big bow made almost another room. An octagonal table, leather covered, came near to filling it. They squeezed past, and leaned out of the casement among the thick-flowered jasmine and wistaria. When I say they drifted, I do not really mean what I say. To Lucilla and Dix they no doubt appeared to drift. But what really drew her to the window was the action of Mr. Rochester. He too had taken a book from the shelf, and had held it out for Jane's inspection. And when she looked it wasn't a rare edition or a picture of a manticora or a ruined abbey that she beheld, but a slip of paper on which was written, "Please come to the window. I have something secret to tell you."

Now you must know that during the last few weeks Jane, by an art so consummate as almost to have deserved from an unkind critic the epithet of artfulness, had succeeded in being very nice indeed to Mr. Rochester in public, and at the same time had most resolutely avoided all occasions of converse with him except public ones.