So the Fairy Prince was escorted downstairs and out into the garden, to give his verdict on that despised spot, and looked round with those quick movements of his eye from side to side without turning his head, which again seemed now the only possible way of looking at things. “But what on earth _is_ good enough for you, David?” he said. “You can’t read Keats except out of a second edition, and you told me the attics were rather fun once, and you say the garden is rotten! Look at those brick walls, look at the house, look at the mulberry-tree! Oh, I say, what are those stones in the corner? Isn’t that a Roman altar?” “Yes, I believe so,” said David. “Do you care about those things?” Maddox and he walked down to the collection of old stones which had appeared to David the dullest of the antique things of Baxminster. Some of the lettering on one of these was still distinguishable. “Yes, ‘Optimo Maximo,’” said Maddox. “I expect that gap is ‘Jovi.’ Then, lower down, do you see, ‘P. Aelius’: that must be the chap who dedicated it. Funny that it should stand here now for you and me to read, while the cathedral tower squints at us over the attics where the ghosts live.” Maddox had seated himself cross-legged on the grass to examine the altar, and David leaned over him following the letters as he traced them with his smooth brown finger. And at once the subject even of Roman altars leaped into interest. Maddox shaded the lowest line of the inscription with his hand to catch the shape of the weather-worn letters. “Can’t read any more,” he said. “But anyhow one day, long before the cathedral was built, Publius Aelius set that up, because the gods had been good to him. What a lot of jolly things there are! And some fellows go mooning along never looking at anything.” “I’m afraid you mean me,” suggested David modestly. Maddox looked up at him over his shoulder. “Well, I don’t,” he said. “And there’s a bit of an arch. Perhaps that came from the temple where P. Aelius put his altar.” Maddox asked for (and was given) another look at the Keats before he left, and proposed to David that he should walk with him as far as the old palace. “Best afternoon I’ve spent for ages,” said the Idol, as they parted. “I wish I wasn’t going away to-morrow, or I should ask to be allowed to come again. Anyhow, we meet at Adams’s in September.” A haunting doubt had been present in David’s mind at intervals all that heavenly afternoon. Now it had to find expression. “I say, I hope it hasn’t been awful cheek of me to have asked you to have tea, and all that?” he said. “I can stand lots of that sort of cheek,” said the other. CHAPTER VIII