I shouldn’t be surprised if he was really almost as fine as Richard the Third.” “How amusing!” said Vestalia at this point, and Mosscrop was swift to take the hint. They moved on through the Greek rooms, where the girl had more of a chance. She had known a few of the students who are accustomed on giving days to offer up sacrifices of time and crayons and good white paper in front of the more fashionable statues, and this had provided her with what seemed to her companion an exhaustive familiarity with Hellenic art. This advantage followed and remained with her amid the sombre and lofty fragments of the Mausoleum, and shone about her when they confronted the frieze of the Parthenon. “It is not my subject,” he remarked, delightedly. “This is a Hermes, you say, and that a Winged Goddess of Victory. Ah, and this is a River God. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. It is charming--to come with you. We supplement each other. Sure enough, I ought to have foreseen that you would know about Greek art. It is just the field that would attract a beautiful young woman. It fits you--it belongs to you.” “How--now!” she admonished him, holding up a finger in playful protest. “Oh,” he urged, “if I’m not to say that you are beautiful, we might as well not have any birthday at all. That is its most elementary fact--lying at the very foundation of everything. To ignore it would be like trying to celebrate the Fifth of November without a guy.” Again she shot a glance of dubiety at him. “I don’t know in the least how to take that,” she confessed, with a quiver on her lip. He laughed outright at this, and gaily patted her on the shoulder. “This unnatural Attic levity of mine is all the fault of the frieze. I’m a cat in a strange garret here. Hasten with me to the Assyrian rooms, if you want to see the utmost height of solemnity it is given to mortals to attain.” He was not quite as good as his word, when they began loitering along before the carved tablets from Nineveh and Khorsabad. Instruction he could not help piling upon his companion, for this was _his_ subject, but he found himself seasoning it with all sorts of sprightly commentaries on the serious text. Of grave and sportive alike he had so much to say that Vestalia took his arm, and leant upon it as they made their slow progress through the long corridors. The contact was exhilarating to him. He could not be sure that she was assimilating any large proportion of his discourse, but her pretence of interest at least was very pretty, and the touch of her arm in his was full of inspiration to his tongue.