We passed through the glazed doors and along the Roman Gallery. I rang at the closed door where the temporary tickets are obtained. There was no difficulty, and slowly we walked past the double row of Cæsars and Emperors again. I had taken her arm. Somehow I suddenly felt as though I were about to lose her, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for an even longer one. I spoke in a low voice.
"Do you think it will be--safe? Just to walk in on him, I mean. Wouldn't it be better to prepare him first?"
"No, no--that's the one thing I _am_ sure of."
"I don't know. If I can't there's an end of everything, so I must."
"No, nor that either." She flushed a little as she said it.
I think, though I am not sure, that there was jealousy in that flush. In that unspeakable solitude of his Derry had so far only a single friend--myself. She was prepared, if she could, to steal my share of him, to have him all to herself.
"But I've got to see him to-day; I promised it," I said.
"Then off you go now, while I'm here. But you're not to say a word about my coming. Then if I were you I should get off to Haslemere."
She meant I had better get out of the way altogether. I sighed.... "Well, come and get your books."
We sought the reading-room, and I put her into a seat and passed to the catalogue counter. I took her slips to her for signature, dropped them into the basket, and then returned to her. It was early, and few readers had yet arrived. We were in the "N" bay, which we had to ourselves. I saw her look up at the million books, dingy and misty in the pale light of the high rotunda. I saw her dark eyes travel along the frieze of names in tarnished gold--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning. In the past I have spent a good deal of time in the reading-room; now it is a place I get out of as quickly as I can. It crushes me, annihilates my spirit with the weight of the vanity of vanities. Of the makers, as well as of the making of books, there is no end. They are born, they lisp, they spell, they write; and then they die. The eager heart, the busy brain, are a few tarnished letters on a frieze, a strip of paper gummed into the casualty-list of a catalogue. We think, write, and to-morrow we die. Only one man was not going to think, write, and die to-morrow. He was going to be different from all men who had gone before him. Because of something that had happened to him, he was going to blazon his name, not in that circular cemetery of dead books, but across the whole width of the heavens outside.