To close the secret
door safely but noiselessly, to make sure that the books were in
the right places, to move away to another row of shelves so as to
be discovered deep in "Badminton" or "Baedeker" or whomever the
kind gods should send to his aid the difficulty was not to decide
what to do, but to do all this in five seconds rather than in
six.
"Ah, there you are," said Cayley from the doorway.
"Hallo!" said Bill, in surprise, looking up from the fourth
volume of "The Life and Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge." "Have
they finished?"
"Finished what?"
"The pond," said Bill, wondering why he was reading Coleridge on
such a fine afternoon. Desperately he tried to think of a good
reason .... verifying a quotation--an argument with Antony--that
would do. But what quotation?
"Oh, no. They're still at it. Where's Gillingham?"
'The Ancient Mariner'--water, water, everywhere--or was that
something else? And where was Gillingham? Water, water
everywhere . . .
"Tony? Oh, he's about somewhere. We're just going down to the
village.
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