Once in the
passage we had to go different ways, and I bowed and was going mine
without a word, when she put her hand on my arm and stayed me.
"I'm sorry you've lost your Virgil," she said.
I wondered, as already so many times I had wondered, at the somersaults
of feeling she was capable of. Where was now the Margaret of the short,
disdainful laugh? Not here, in the twilight between the bright room and
the black yard. Here was a subtle, mysterious Margaret, half regret and
half caprice, with one thought in her eyes and another on her lips.
"So am I, madam. I wish it had been Kate's cookery-book."
She would have mastered me had I stayed another second. I bowed again and
left her.
And this is, perhaps, the best place to say that I did not lose my Virgil
after all. Here it is on the table as I write, still the dearest of all my
books. On each side of the healing an irregular curve of teeth-marks cuts
into the yellowing parchment. Dear, brave Cherry-Cheeks sent it home by
the hands of a vagrom pedlar, laboriously and exactly writing on the
package the inscription she found on the fly leaf:
OLIVER WHEATMAN, Esquire,
of the Hanyards,
Staffordshire,
_Aetatis anno_ 13
I routed out ostlers, and by dint of a judicious blend of cursings and
bribings had the horses ready under the archway in time.
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