"I know now," said he. "Yes, of course I knew it. Don't let's pretend we aren't both jolly glad we met her." "No, don't let's," said she. And laid her hand on his. His turned under it and held it, lightly yet tenderly, as his hand knew that hers would wish to be held, and not another word did either say till their car drew up at the prosperous, preposterous Shakespeare Inn at Stratford-on-Avon. But all through the drive soft currents of mutual kindness and understanding, with other electricities less easy to classify, ran from him to her and from her to him, through the contact of their quiet clasped hands. The inn at Stratford is intolerably half timbered. Whatever there may have been of the old woodwork is infinitely depreciated by the modern imitation which flaunts itself everywhere. The antique mockery is only skin deep and does not extend to the new rooms, each named after one of Shakespeare's works, and all of a peculiarly unpleasing shape, and furnished exactly like the rooms of any temperance hotel. The room where Katherine washed the dust of the road from her pretty face was called "The Tempest," and the sitting-room where they had tea was a hideous oblong furnished in the worst taste of the middle-Victorian lower middle class, and had "Hamlet" painted on its door. "We must see the birthplace, I suppose," said Edward, "but before we go I should like to warn you that there is not a single authentic relic of Shakespeare, unless it's the house where they say he was born, and even that was never said to be his birthplace till a hundred and fifty years after his death, and even then two other houses claimed the same honor. If ever a man was born in three places at once, like a bird, that man was William Shakespeare." "You aren't a Baconian, are you?" she asked, looking at him rather timidly across the teacups. "But you can't be, because I know they're all mad." "A good many of them are very, very silly," he owned, "but don't be afraid. I'm not a Baconian, for Baconians are convinced that Bacon wrote the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature off his own bat. I only think there's a mystery. You remember Dickens said the life of Shakespeare was a fine mystery and he trembled daily lest something should turn up." "And nothing has."