"The same thing’s occurred to me. But what for?"

"To make Professor Hall-Waddington look silly? Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it and tell him in your nice way. Maybe there was supposed to be a big scandal."

"Possibly… This is all pretty conjectural, isn’t it?"

"Yes, but it’s fascinating."

They crossed a final footbridge and found themselves with surprising suddenness out of the dappled shade and back on the High Street, a few blocks from where they’d started.

Gideon looked at his watch. "Feel like walking some more?"

"Uh-uh."

"Want to drop into a pub?"

"They don’t open for another hour."

"That’s right. Well, let’s see, what can we do?"

She cocked her head at him. "Here you are on your honeymoon, with your beautiful young bride at your side, and your hotel less than two blocks away…and you can’t think of anything to do?"

"Nope," he said blandly, "not a thing. But why don’t we go up to our room, take off our clothes, and lie down? Maybe something will occur to me."

It was two hours before they arrived for dinner at the Judge Jeffreys on the High Street, an ancient inn with a grim past, having been the lodging of Baron George Jeffreys, the presiding judge at the Bloody Assize of 1685, when seventy-four of Cromwell’s royalist opponents had been executed. Nevertheless, the dining room was cozy and country-pubbish, a centuries-old room with rough-beamed ceiling and stone-mullioned, multipaned windows of wavy, leaded glass.

"What would you think," Gideon said as they settled into a black, gleaming wooden booth, "of spending the next day or two in Charmouth? Since we’re in the area anyway, I’d like to drop in on a dig near there-Stonebarrow Fell. I thought maybe I’d better stop in and see how Nate Marcus is doing."