"Oh, one can't read everything," he said. "But one gets to pick up enough about a book to know whether he cares to read it. Of course, I am aware it is about a little baby on board a ship that makes charming inarticulate orations and is worshipped by everybody, from the captain to the little stowaway, and is regarded by the sailors as the sweet little cherub that sits up aloft, etc., and that there is a sensational description of a storm at sea--which is Clarke Russell and water, or rather Clarke Russell and more water." "Ah, I see you're a cynic," said Ellaline. "I don't like cynics." "No, indeed, I am not," he pleaded. "It is false, not true, sentiment I object to." "And how do you know this is false sentiment?" she asked in honest indignation. "When you haven't read it?" "What does it matter?" he murmured, overwhelmed by her sense of duty. She was evidently unaccustomed to the light flippancies of elegant conversation. "Oh, nothing. To some people nothing matters. Will you promise to read the book if I lend it you?" "Of course I will," he said, delighted at the establishment of so permanent a link. "Only I don't want to deprive you of it--I can wait till you have finished with it." "I have finished. I have read it over and over again. Take it." She handed it to him. Their finger-tips met. "I recant already," he said. "It must have something pure and good in it to take captive a soul like yours." And indeed the glamour of Ellaline was over every page of it. As he read, he found tears of tenderness in his eyes, when otherwise they might have sprung from laughter. He adored the little cherub who sat up aloft on the officers' table and softened these crusty sea-dogs whose hearts were become as ship's-biscuits. He could not tell what had come over himself, that his own sere heart should be so quick again to the beauties of homely virtue and duty, to the engaging simplicity and pathos of childhood, to the purity of womanhood. Was it that Ellaline was all these things incarnate? He avowed his error and his conversion, and gradually they came to meet often in the solitary creek, as was but right for the only two intellectual people in Trepolpen. Sometimes, too, they wandered further afield, amid the ferny lanes. But the Cove was their favorite trysting place, and there lying with his head in her lap, he would talk to her of books and men and one woman. [Illustration: Talked to her of books and men and one woman.] He found her tastes were not limited to _The Cherub That Sits Up Aloft_, for she liked Meredith. "Really," he said, "if you had not been yourself, I should have doubted whether your admiration was genuine." "Yes, his women are so real. But I do not pretend to care for the style." "Style!" he said, "I call it a five-barred fence. To me style is everything. Style alone is literature, whether it be the man or not." "Oh, then you are of the school of Addiper?"