"I would not have answered," Judith agreed. "Captain Leventhorpe, I do not think I ought to receive you. My aunt is lying down."
"Then I shall stand in the hall, and you may stay in the parlour, and we shall shout." He said it so seriously that it took her a moment to see he was not serious at all. "No. I beg your pardon. You are quite right, and I shall go if you tell me to. But I think I ought to tell you first who I am, because you will hear it from someone else in a day or two and I would rather you heard it from me. Sir Augustus Threlkeld is my mother's brother."
She had sat down without meaning to. She stood up again.
"Then I am sure you have come to tell me I was impertinent, sir, and you need not trouble. I know it."
"I have come," said Captain Leventhorpe, "because at about two o'clock this morning I took this out of my uncle's library without asking him, and I have been sitting up with it ever since, and I am a sea-officer and not a mathematician, and I should very much like you to tell me whether I am going mad." He put the parcel down on the table between them and undid the string. "It is the proof. He gave it me to read in January. He wishes me to speak for it before the Board of Longitude when it comes up for their approval. I have been at sea since I was eleven years old, Miss Penrose, and I have worked more lunars than I can count; and I read this proof in January, and admired it very much, and never once looked at the sign in the third table. And last night a lady stood up and told four hundred people that it was wrong, and my uncle laughed at her. And I went home and looked."
He opened the proof at a page marked with a slip of paper and turned it towards her.
She did not sit down. She bent over the table with her hands on either side of the book and looked at the third table, the long dense columns of minutes and seconds under their headings, Apparent Distance, Moon's Apparent Altitude, and her eye ran down to ninety degrees, and past it, and on.
Every figure beyond ninety degrees stood under the same heading as every figure before it. And at the head of the table, in small italic, was the instruction: This correction is always to be added.
"Yes," she said quietly. "Yes. I am afraid that is just what I thought."
"I have checked it against my own journal," said Captain Leventhorpe. "That is the other reason I came."
* * *