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Then he laid it back beside its mate in her lap and arose, laughing.

“It will never do for me to be neurasthenic as well as blind,” he said, cheerfully. “I suspect I’m staying indoors too much; a man should go hay-making—when the sun shines! I’ll fetch the book I have in mind for to-day’s reading—unless you have something you’d prefer?”

He stepped quickly across the room, went to the poetry shelves, stooped, and took from the middle shelf a volume which he slapped on his left hand, brushed it across the top, and brought it to Anne.

“Suit you? Are you in the mood for it?” he asked.

It was Dante in the prose translation. Anne looked at it and smiled up at him.

“Just in the mood for it,” she said. “But I’d like to read the ‛Paradise’—or would you rather ‛begin at the beginning,’ as children say?”

“No, indeed, I’d rather hear ‛Paradise’ myself,” Richard Latham said, and resumed his chair, pulling his smoking table up to it.

“It’s your one secretarial fault, Miss Dallas: you are not a linguist. I’ve a fine old tooled copy of Dante, Italian. I’d like to teach you Italian. I lived over there a good while. Perhaps we may take up——”