The Duke of Hollingbourne signed the whole of it on the 29th of September. Then, standing in the library, he said one thing more. "Verity, if this becomes intolerable to you, for any reason at all, and you need not give me the reason, you will say so, and it ends, and the three years are paid regardless."

"That is a great deal of money for nothing, sir." "It is the price of you being able to leave," he said. "I have thought about it a good deal this month, and I find I cannot bear to have you in this house on any other terms."

She opened Lady Sarah's quarto book on the 1st of October at nine in the morning. The Duke of Hollingbourne opened the drawer, put the book on the table, went out of the room, and did not come back for four hours. It was two-thirds full. The hand was small and quick, and got smaller as it went on.

There were 2,011 entries, and there was the fourth column, which nobody had ever explained to Alice. It took her about four entries to understand what it was, and when she did, she had to put her head down on the table for a moment. It was not notes about classification. It was Sarah.

Cicero, Ep. Ad Fam., Aldine, 1502. Case two, shelf four. Beautiful and I cannot read a word of it. H says he will teach me and he will not.

Hakluyt, Voyages, 1599. Case four, shelf one. The best thing in this house. If there is a fire, take this one.

Burnet, History of His Own Time, 1724. Case seven, shelf two. A liar, but an entertaining one. Which is worse?

Thucydides, Hobbes trans., case two, shelf two, boards gone. Nobody has read this in ninety years and I shall.

There were 2,011 of them. Alice Verity worked at that table for two years and eleven months and got to 4,081. She wrote her own fourth column because on the 9th of October she asked whether she should and the Duke of Hollingbourne said, "God, yes. She would have been furious if you had not."

They worked in the same room most days from December. That was not planned, and neither of them ever quite acknowledged how it had happened. He came in at ten with the estate letters because the light was better; then he came in at nine. By February, there were two tables in that library and a second inkstand, and Thorne brought the tray in for two without being told.

They talked about the books. That was almost all they talked about for a year. Alice understood perfectly well what was being avoided and was extremely glad of it.

She read Herodotus in March because she had told nine people at a dinner table that she had never read a word of it, and it had been true, and it had irritated her ever since. She said so, and he laughed. Then he went to London in April and came back with Herodotus in two volumes, put it on her table, and said, "Case two, shelf four. Write it up properly."

She looked at the flyleaf. It read: A. Verity, from H., who has been told at his own table in front of nine people exactly what he is. September 1829. Alice Verity sat and looked at that inscription for rather a long time.

Then she wrote the entry in her own fourth column, and the entry was still there decades later. Herodotus, Histories, Beloe trans., two vols., 1830, case two, shelf four. I did not have this when I was asked about it and now I do. It is not what I expected. He goes on a great deal about the Egyptians.

The trouble began in June of 1831. It came from London in the form of a letter from a firm of solicitors that the Duke of Hollingbourne read at his own table in that library and put down without a word. Alice looked up from her work.

"My cousin's wife has written to my aunt," he said, "and my aunt has written to her lawyer, and the lawyer has written to mine, and the whole of it comes to about eleven lines. Those lines say that there is a young woman of no family living at my expense at Hollingbourne under a pretense of literary employment, and that in the event of my dying unmarried, my aunt would consider it her duty to see that no claim of any kind arising out of that arrangement should be permitted to embarrass the family."

Alice put down her pen. "They think you mean to marry me." "They do not think it. They have been told it by Sowerby, who has been saying it in three counties for eighteen months." He was extremely calm, which frightened Alice a great deal more than shouting would have.