Thus adjured, they have come to a halt, and the presentation
is made.
“Surely,” think I, glancing at Barbara’s
face, slightly flushed by the heat, and still gently
grave with the sobriety of expression left by devotion,
“he must see the likeness now!”
To insure his having the chance of telling her that
he does, I fall behind with Algy.
Claret cup has washed the dust from our throats; cold
lamb and mayonnaise have restored the force of body
and equanimity of mind which the exhausted air and
long-drawn Gregorian chants of Tempest Church destroyed.
Frank is lunching with us. He had accompanied
us to our own gates, and had then made a feint of
leaving, but I had pressed him, with an eagerness
proportioned to the seriousness of my design upon him,
to accompany us, and he had yielded with a willing
ease.
I cannot help thinking that Algy does not look altogether
pleased with the arrangement, but after all, it is
my house, and not Algy’s. It is the first
time that I have entertained a guest since the far-off
childish birthdays, when the neighbors’ little
boys and girls used to be gathered together to drink
tea out of the doll’s tea service. In the
afternoon, we all walk to church again, and in the
same order. Barbara and Algy in front, Frank
and I behind. I had planned differently, but
Algy is obtuse, Barbara will come into the manoeuvres,
and Frank seems simply indifferent. So it happens,
that all through the park, and up the bit of dusty
white road we are out of ear-shot of the other two.
“A sky worthy of Dresden!” says Mr. Musgrave,
throwing back his head and looking up at the pale
blue sultriness above our heads—the waveless,
stormless ether sea—as we pace along, with
the church-bells’ measured ding-dong in our
ears, and the cool ripe grasses about our feet.
“Dear Dresden!” say I, pensively,
with a sigh of mixed regret and remorse, as I look
back on the sunshiny hours that at the time I thought
so long, in that fair, white foreign town.
“Dear Linkesches Bad!” says Frank, sighing
too.
“Dear Groosegarten!” cry I, thinking of
the long pottering stroll that Roger and I had taken
one evening up and down its green alleys, and that
then I had found so tedious.
“Dear Zwinger!” retorts Frank.
“Dear Weisserhirsch!” say I, half sadly.
“Dear white acacias! dear drives under the acacias!”
“Drives under the acacias!” echoes
Frank, dropping his accent of sentimentalism, and
speaking rather sharply. “We never had any
drives under the acacias! We never had any drives
at all, that I recollect!”
“You had not, I dare say,” reply
I, carelessly, “but we had. They
are the things that I look back at with the greatest
pleasure of any thing that happened there!”
Frank does not apostrophize as “dear”
any other public resort; indeed, he turns away his
head, and we walk on without uttering a word for a
few moments.
