Lestrange began to feel uncomfortable. If he let this prodigy go on talking and asking questions, he would find out how little he knew about anything! But Richard was no prodigy. He was only a youth capable of interest in everything.

Further talk followed. Lestrange grew interested in the phenomenon of a blacksmith that bound books and read them. He began to dream of patronage and responsive devotion. What a thing it would be for him, in later years, with the cares of property and parliament combining to curtail his leisure, to have such a man available to him at any moment, able to gather the information he desired, and to embody it so as to render his chief the best-informed man in the House! At other times he could manage for him his troublesome tenants, and upon occasion shoe his wife’s favourite horse! He could also depend upon him to provide, from the rich stores of his memory, suitable quotations when he wished to make a speech!

Lestrange had never thought whether the wish to appear might not indicate the duty to be. He had never seen that, until he was, to desire to appear was to cherish the soul of a sneak. He had no notion of anything but the look of things.

“I think I’ll go and have a pipe with the coachman,” said the blacksmith at length.

“As you please, Armour,” answered Lestrange. “I will take care of your—nephew, is he?”

“My grandson, sir—from London.”

“All right! There’s good stuff in the breed, Armour! I will bring him to you.”

Richard went on taking book after book down and showing his host how much attention they required.

“And you could set all right for—for how much?” asked Lestrange.

“That no one could say. It would, however, cost little more than time and skill. The material would not come to much. Only, where the paper itself is in decay, I don’t know about that. I have learned nothing in that department yet.”

“For generations none of us have cared about books—that must be why they have gone so badly downhill—the books, I mean,” he added with a laugh. “There was a bishop somewhere in the family, and I think a poet. But I doubt my father would want to lay out money on the library.”

“Tell him,” suggested Richard, “that it is a very valuable library—at least so it appears to me from the little I have seen of it. But it is rapidly declining in value. After another twenty years of neglect, it would not fetch half the price it might easily be brought up to now.”

“I don’t know that would weigh much with him. So long as he sees the shelves full and the book backs all right, he won’t want anything better. He cares only about how things look.”

“But the whole look of the library is growing worse—gradually, it is true, and in a measure it can’t be helped—but faster than you would think, and faster than it ought to. I fear damp is getting in somewhere.”