She looked from one to the other and Chris decided that it was a good thing for him that Becky likened him to the object of her doting, Master Cilley. "Get along with you!" she cried again, pulling Chris up out of his chair by his coat collar. "You are wanted by the master in his study, so look sharp! It's down the passage and to your right," Becky said, "and knock before you go in!" Chris started off, but in the dusk of the passage he looked back in time to see Becky Boozer lost in tittering giggles and wild blushes as Master Cilley, reaching up as high as his arm would go, chucked her under the chin. CHAPTER 6 Chris stood for a moment before the closed door of Mr. Wicker's study. His head was full of the story of Becky Boozer's hat or he might have glimpsed the room beside him--for the passage stopped at this point. Beyond the passage lay the dimly glimmering shop with its bow window at the far end, and the door to the street beside it. He might have been able, had he not been so intent on Becky's story, to slip past the dusty bales and cases and out into--what? But Chris's head was ringing with Ned Cilley's tale, and with all the things, so different and so absorbing, that surrounded him. He put out his hand, knocked, and on hearing a low reply, stepped inside. The room Chris entered, his eyes round in order to take in every new sight, was a small study. It stretched across the back of the house. The kitchen fireplace had its echo in a fireplace on this side of the wall, and facing Chris three windows looked out onto the pleached pear and apple trees; the ordered rows of the vegetable and herb garden. A final window at the end of the room, at Chris's left, looked out on a little hill behind the house. Chris, without thinking, stepped forward a pace or two in order to look for the familiar ugly red and gray church at the end of Church Lane. It was not to be seen. There was only a pasture hemmed by woods and fine trees with, in the distance where M Street should be, a roof or two. A thin voice, that came from nowhere and was everywhere, broke in to Chris. "No, my boy. The church is not yet built. That will come in seventy years. In eighteen-sixty, to be exact. Confusing, is it not?" Chris whipped about at the sound of the antiquarian's voice but for a moment longer he could not see him, and looked toward the other end of the room with interest.