Somehow, though he had only seen Mary Tudor once, for those few minutes in the shop, he attached a very singular and sentimental importance to binding that book for her. She was a pretty girl, for one thing--an extremely pretty girl--and he admired her intensely. But that wasn't all; she was a Tudor, as well, and he was a Plan-tagenet. In some vague, half-conscious way he reflected more than once that 'it had gone with a Tudor, and with a Tudor it might come back again.' What he meant by that _it_ he hardly knew himself. Certainly not the crown of this United Kingdom; for Dick was far too good a student of constitutional history not to be thoroughly aware that the crown of England itself was elective, not hereditary; and he had far too much common-sense to suppose for one moment that the people of these three realms would desire to disturb the Act of Settlement and repeal the Union in order to place a local dancing-master or a bookseller's assistant on the throne of England--for to Scotland he hadn't even the shadowy claim of an outside pretender. As he put it himself, 'We were fairly beaten out of there once for all by the Bruce, and had never at the best of times any claim to speak of.' No; what he meant by _It_ was rather some dim past greatness of the Plantagenet family, which the bookseller's lad hoped to win back to some small extent in the noblest and best of all ways--by deserving it. The days wore away; Stubbs and Freeman were well thumbed; the two books for Mary Tudor were bound in the daintiest fashion known to Chiddingwickian art, and on the morning of the eventful Wednesday itself, when he was first to try his fate at Oxford, Dick took them up in person, neatly wrapped in white tissue-paper, to the door of the Rectory. Half-way up the garden-path Mary met him by accident. She was walking in the grounds with one of the younger children; and Dick, whose quick imagination had built up already a curious castle in the air, felt half shocked to find that a future Queen of England, Wales, and Ireland (_de jure_) should be set to take care of the Rector's babies. However, he forgot his indignation when Mary, recognising him, advanced with a pleasant smile--her smile was always considered the prettiest thing about her--and said in a tone as if addressed to an equal: 'Oh, you've brought back my books, have you? That's punctuality itself. Don't mind taking them to the door. How much are they, please? I'll pay at once for them.' Now, this was a trifle disconcerting to Dick, who had reasons of his own for not wishing her to open the parcel before him. Still, as there was no way out of it, he answered in a somewhat shamefaced and embarrassed voice: 'It comes to three-and-sixpence.'