Landry and Laura were in the library at the rear of the house, a small room, two sides of which were occupied with bookcases. They were busy putting the books in place. Laura stood halfway up the stepladder taking volume after volume from Landry as he passed them to her.

“Do you wipe them carefully, Landry?” she asked.

He held a strip of cloth torn from an old sheet in his hand, and rubbed the dust from each book before he handed it to her.

“Yes, yes; very carefully,” he assured her. “Say,” he added, “where are all your modern novels? You’ve got Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, of course, and Eliot⁠—yes, and here’s Hawthorne and Poe. But I haven’t struck anything later than Oliver Wendell Holmes.”