Miss Lane’s parlour door opened out into the public portion of the office and it sometimes happened that after attending to the telegraph instrument Laura found herself cut off from the inner side of the counter by what appeared to be a private and confidential conversation between Miss Lane and a customer. Then she would close the door softly and go straight to the bookcase. A few books, such as Cooking and Household Management, The Complete Farrier, and Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, were kept on one of the kitchen window-seats, but all the best books were kept behind glass doors above the bureau in the parlour. When one of these was lent to Laura, it had first to be fitted with a brown-paper jacket, for Miss Lane was very particular about her books, most of which had belonged to her father.

The collection was an unusual one to be found in a tradesman’s parlour at that time; but her father had been an unusual man, a lover of poetry, especially of Shakespeare, and a student of history and astronomy.

There were The Works of William Shakespeare in two large, flat volumes, and Hume’s History of England in at least a dozen small fat ones, Scott’s Poetical Works and a number of the Waverley Novels, Cowper’s poems and Campbell’s and Gray’s, Thomson’s Seasons and many other such books. Any of these, she was told, she might borrow; with one exception. That was Byron’s Don Juan, a terrible book, she was told, and most unfit for her reading. “I don’t know why I haven’t destroyed it long ago,” said Miss Lane. “Next time there’s a bonfire in the garden, I must see about it.”

Laura knew she ought to be, and was, ashamed of herself when, at every opportunity, she stood before the bookcase with goggling eyes and many a guilty glance at the door, devouring another half-canto of Don Juan. She slipped the book into her pocket one night and took it to read in bed and narrowly escaped detection when Miss Lane came suddenly into her room to give some instruction about the next morning’s mail. She saved herself by tucking the book down into the bed beside her, but the feel of its sharp edges against her side made her so incoherent that Miss Lane glanced round suspiciously. “No reading in bed, now,” she said. “You’ve got no need to wear out your eyesight, and I’m sure I don’t fancy being burnt to death in my sleep.” And Laura replied in a small, meek voice, “No, Miss Lane.”