"WHERE is Charles?" she asked next day. Edward had called for her early, had paid the Midlothian's bill and tipped the Midlothian's servants, and now they were in a taxi on their way to Paddington. She had definitely put her finger on the map that morning, and its tip had covered the K's of Kenilworth and Warwick. She was still almost breathless with the hurry with which she had been swept away from the safe anchorage of the hotel, "and couldn't we have the hood¹ down?" she added.
 
"Charles," said Edward, "is at present boarded out at a mews down Portland Road way, and I think we'd better keep the hood up. Look here! I never thought of the newspapers. This is worse than ever."
 
He handed her the Telegraph. Yesterday's advertisement was repeated in it—with this addition:
 
May be in company with tall, fair young man. Blue eyes, military appearance. Possesses large, white bull-terrier.
 
 
"Oh dear! They'll track us down," she said, and laughed. "What sleuth-hounds they are! But they can't do anything to me, can they? They can't take me back, I mean. I'm twenty-one, you know. Can't you do as you like when you're twenty-one?"
 
She looked at the paper again, and now her face suddenly became clouded and her eyes filled with tears. "I never thought of that." She hesitated a moment and handed him the paper, pointing to the place with the finger that had found Warwick and Kenilworth. Below the advertisement touching² the young man and the bull-terrier, he read:
 
Silver Locks—Come back. I am ill and very anxious.
 
Aunt Alice.
"That means. . .?"
 
"It means me. I'm Silver Locks—it's her pet name for me. I called my aunts the three bears once, when I was little, in fun, you know. And the others were angry—but she laughed and called me Silver Locks. And she's called it me ever since. I never thought about her worrying. What am I to do? I must go back. I thought it was too good to last, yesterday," she added, bitterly.
 
He put the admission away in a safe place, whence later he could take it out and caress³ it, and said, "Of course you must go back if you want to. But don't do it without thinking. We meant to talk over our plans yesterday, but somehow we didn't. Let's do it to-day."
 
"But I can't go to Warwick. I must go back to her—I must."
 
"If you do," he said, "you won't go back to just her—you'll go back to the whole miserable⁴ muddle⁵ you've got away from. You'll go back to your other aunts and to your father. Besides, how do you know who put that advertisement in? Think carefully. Is the advertisement like her?"
 
"It's like her to be anxious and kind," said she.
 
"I mean, is she the sort of woman to advertise that she's ill? To advertise your pet name—and her own name—so that every one who knows you both and sees the advertisement will know that you are being advertised for? Is that like her?" He ended, astonished at his own penetration⁶.
 
"No," she said, slowly, "it isn't. And it isn't like her to say she's ill. She never complains."
 
"She wouldn't use her illness as a lever to move events to her liking⁷?"
 
"Never!" she said, almost indignantly.
 
"Then I think that this advertisement is some one else's. Where does she live."
 
"Hyde Park Square."
 
"Let us telegraph her, and not go to Warwick."
 
 
They stopped the taxi and composed a message. He despatched it.
 
Did you put advertisement in paper to-day? And are you ill? I am quite well and will write at once. Wire reply to Silver Locks, General Post-Office.
 
Then they told the man to drive around Regent's Park, to pass the time till there should be an answer.
 
In the park the trees were already brown, and on the pale, trampled⁸ grass long heaps of rags, like black grave-mounds, showed where weary men who had tramped London all night, moved on by Law and Order, inexorable in blue and silver, now at last had their sleep out, in broad sunshine, under the eyes of the richest city in the world. Little children, dirty and poor—their childhood triumphant⁹ over dirt and poverty—played happily in the grass that was less grass than dust.
 
"What a horrible place London is!" she said. "Think of yesterday."
 
That, too, he put away to be taken out and loved later.
 
"We won't stay in London," he said, "if the answer is what I think it will be. We'll go out into the green country and decide what we're going to do."
 
 
"But if she did put the advertisement in, it means that she's very ill. And then I must go to her."
 
"But if she didn't—and I more and more think she didn't—they may send some one to the General Post-Office post-haste—so it won't do for you to go for the telegram. Do you know the Guildhall Library?"
 
"No."
 
"It's a beautiful place—very quiet, very calm. And the officials are the best chaps I've ever found in any library anywhere. We'll go there. You must want to look up something. Let's see—the dates of the publication of Bacon's works. Write your name in the book—any name you like, so long as it isn't your own; then ask one of the officials to help you, and go and sit at one of the side tables—they're like side chapels¹⁰ in a cathedral—and stay there till I come. You'll be as safe and as secret as if you were in the Bastille. And I'll baffle pursuit and come to you as soon as I can."
 
"Yes," she said, meekly¹¹.
 
"And don't worry," he urged. "The more I think of it, the more certain I am that it was not the aunt you like who wrote that advertisement—"
 
He was right. The telegram with which, an hour later, he presented himself at the Guildhall Library ran thus:
 
I did not write advertisement and I am not specially¹² ill, but I am very anxious. Write at once. Aunt Loo and Aunt Enid are both here. I think they must have inserted the advertisement. A.
 
"Your Aunt Alice is a sportsman," he said, "to warn you like that."
 
"I told you she was a darling," she answered—and her whole face had lighted up with relief—"and you are the cleverest person in the world! I should never have thought about its not being her doing, never in a thousand years. You deserve a medal and a statue and a pension."
 
"I don't deserve more than I've got," said he, "nor half so much. The sun shines again."
 
She flashed a brilliant smile at him, and pushed a brown book along the table.
 
"I suppose we ought to look studious," she said, "or they'll turn us out. I am so glad Aunt Alice isn't really worse. You don't know how I've felt while you've been away. It seemed so horribly selfish—to have been so happy and all while she was ill and worried. But, of course, you do know."
 
"Let us go out," he said, putting the books together.
 
"Yes," she said, "I know all about Bacon. Not that I'll ever want to know."
 
"I'm not so sure," said he. "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the Baconians are right, and he was an intellectual giant, almost like Plato and Aristotle rolled into one? We'll go to Stratford some day, and look at Shakespeare's bust¹³ and see if we think he could have written 'The Tempest.'"
 
"You shouldn't judge people by their faces," she said. "Handsome is as handsome does."
 
"Oh, but you should," said he. "It's handsome does as handsome is. I always go by appearances. Don't you? But of course, I know you do—"
 
She opened one of the books and began to turn the pages. "Look what I found," she said, and all the time their voices had been lowered to the key of that studious place. "Look, isn't it pretty? And do you see?—the e's are like the Greek θ. Can you read it?"
 
He read:
 
"Fair Lucrece, kind Catherine, gentle Jane,
But Maria is the dearest name.
Robert Swinford, 1863."
"Yes, that's what I make it. It doesn't rhyme, but I expect Maria was very pleased. Do you think they were studying with a stern tutor, and he wrote that and pushed it over to her when no[145] one was looking? It's an odd thing to have written in a Natural History book. There's something more on another page—but it doesn't make sense:
 
"I am true rew Hebrew—CXIX—101."
"I expect he was just trying a pen. Come, the librarian has his scholarly eye on you."
 
"I should like to look through all the old books and find out all the names people have written and make stories about them," she said, and he received the curious impression that she was talking against time; there was about her a sort of hanging back from the needful movement of departure. He picked the books up and carried them to the counter, she following, and they walked in silence down the gallery hung with Wouvermans and his everlasting¹⁴ gray horse.
 
"Let's go into the Hall," he said. So they turned under the arch and went into the beautiful great vaulted¹⁵ Guildhall, where the giants Gog and Magog occupy the gallery, and little human people can sit below on stone benches against the wall, and gaze on the monuments of the elder and the younger Pitt, and talk at long leisure, undisturbed and undisturbing, which is not the case in the Library, as Edward pointed¹⁶ out.
 
"Now, then," he began.
 
 
"Yes," she said, hurriedly. "Something will have to be done about Aunt Alice."
 
"Yes. But what?"
 
"I don't know." She turned and leaned one hand on the stone seat so that she faced him. "You do believe that I don't regret coming away? I think it would have been splendid to have gone on—like yesterday—but you see it's impossible."
 
"No, I don't," he said, stoutly¹⁷.
 
She made a movement of impatience¹⁸. "Oh yes, it is—quite," she said. "However rich you are, you can't go on forever being blackmailed¹⁹. Every one would know us, or else you'd have to give up Charles, and even then I expect you'd be obliged to pay twenty pounds every three-quarters of an hour. It can't be done. And, besides, we should never know a moment's peace. Wherever we went we should imagine a blackmailer²⁰ behind every bush, and every one we spoke²¹ to might be a detective. It's no use. I must go back. Do say you know I must."
 
"I don't."
 
"Well, say you know I don't want to."
 
"I can't say that . . . because, if you don't want to . . . there's always the old alternative, you know." He was looking straight before him at the majestic²² form of the Earl of Chatham.
 
"What alternative?"
 
 
"Marrying me," he said, humbly²³. "Do. I don't believe that you'd regret it."
 
"When I marry," she said, strongly, "it won't be just because I want to get myself out of a scrape."
 
"I hoped there might be other considerations," he said, still gazing at the marble. "You were happy yesterday. You said so."
 
"You talk as though marrying wer............