Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/224

Rh It's so quiet, and so good. And I wouldn't be in the way. I'd go in and out through the French window."

"And the secret door?"

"Well, I shall always be here, and when you feel you'd like to see it—well, here it is, you know."

"But I can't have secrets from Luce—about secret doors, you know," she added hastily.

"Forgive me for saying that I can. Please let me," he pleaded. "Let me have just this one little secret with you." "Oh, very well," Jane mumbled, anxious to get away from any talk of secrets, especially from the memory of another secret that he had with her—the little secret of their last interview in that room, when. . . Jane looked at his coat—it was the same coat—and wondered how any fabric worn by men could be at once so coarse and so comforting. All the same. ..

"But I thought," she said, picking jasmine flowers and laying the stalks together with earnest accuracy, "I thought you were to take care of your uncle's house till he came back?"

"Oh, that's all off. My uncle met a chap in Paris, and he's lent him his house. He's got a lot of sixteenth and seventeenth century books, you know; and this man's got some wonderful cypher he's finding out, and his health won't let him live in London, near the British Museum, and, of course, these books are a godsend. You see, this cypher is really rather a wonderful thing, so my uncle says—and . . ."

"But tell me," said Jane, who, like most normal human beings, was deeply uninterested in cyphers, "where are you going to live?"

"Well, that's really what I wanted to talk to you about." Jane wondered how she could have ever thought he wanted to talk about anything else—about their last talk in that room, for instance. She could have slapped herself for that refusing shake of the head. What would he think of