It had been a displaced voice at first, whistling through the Poetry section, until she had seen his movement on the other side of the shelves. She had looked through the gap between Dickinson and Donne and then his mouth had been there, making the whispered words.

“‘And the stars climbing the dew-dropping sky, live but to light your passing feet.’”

She had wanted to tell him to shush, that this sort of thing isn’t allowed in the public library, to wave her hands and make the embarrassing words go away, but she could see the smile curling at the edges of his seashell-pink lips.

He was just a white-toothed grin, disembodied like the Cheshire Cat, and words with a scent of boiled sweets. But then he was eyes that watched her through the Romantics and the Classics; a flicker of long lashes and clear bright blue-green eyes that creased at the corners, so that she knew he was smiling on the other side. He existed only in fragments and glimpses and elements, and a voice that linked them all. But then he was a flash of profile, and finally a face that had looked directly down into her own as she had stepped out at the end of the row, as if he had always been there waiting for her.

“‘I bade my heart build these poor rhymes,’” he recites. “‘It worked at them, day out, day in, building a sorrowful loveliness.’”

The whisper of his voice was so soft that she had to step closer to hear him. He had put his eyes to the ceiling to recall the last line and then his gaze had connected with hers. He smiled with something that seemed like satisfaction.

“Yeats,” he had said. “It’s a poem.”

“I gathered that much.”

“Only, when I saw you through the bookcase, I suddenly knew what it meant. I learned it by heart last week.”

“And since then you’ve been like a coiled spring in the Poetry section, waiting to pounce it on unsuspecting females?”

“Not a bit of it.” He had laughed and shaken his head. “It’s not like that at all. I would take your hand and introduce myself properly, only . . .”

His arms were full of books. He braced them with his chin to keep them from slipping. She looked at his chest and read the spines of atlases, a history of Roman Britain, walking guides, and a book of birdsongs.

“You’ll get in trouble for whispering in the library,” she had said. “It’s bad manners. There’s a notice up. They don’t like it.”

“I’ll only be in bother if you report me. Would you tell on me, miss? Will you get me into trouble?”