Barbara was always glad to get away from home. While her father was paying his long-delayed visit to the curate, she was flying over hedge and ditch in a line for that gate of Mortgrange which Simon Armour and his grandson found open. Barbara had a key to it.

She went with swift, gliding step into the library. Richard was piecing together the broken cords of a great old folio—the more easily that they were double—in order to re-attach the loosened sheets and the hanging board, and so get the book ready for a new cover. She carried in her hand something yet more sorely in need of mending—a pigeon with a broken wing, which she had seen lying in the park, and had dismounted to see if she could help. It kept opening and shutting its eyes, and she knew that nothing could be done for it. But the mute appeal of the dying thing had gone to her heart, and she wanted sympathy, whether for it or for herself she could hardly have distinguished.

“Ah, poor thing,” said Richard. “I fear we can do nothing for it. But it will be at rest soon.”

“But where?” said Barbara, to whom that moment came the question for the first time.

“Nowhere, I suppose,” answered Richard.

“How can that be! Poor little thing! I won’t let you go nowhere!”

Richard saw that to say more at that moment would probably be to close the door between them. Therefore he took refuge in his genuine sympathy with suffering.

“Is it not strange,” he said, “that men should take pleasure in killing—especially helpless creatures like that, so full of innocent contentment? It seems to me the greatest pity to stop such a life! Did you ever notice in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the point at which the dead bird falls from the neck of the man?”

“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” answered Barbara. “Do tell me. It sounds like something I should like! Is it a story?”

“Yes—a wonderful story.”

The volume in which Richard had first read the story had come into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form of The Rime as it appeared in the Sibylline Leaves of 1817. But when he came to look at that in the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He also found in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation—a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.