But I am burying my face in Sir Roger’s shoulder,
like a shy child.
“I like you!” I say, creeping up
quite close to him. “You were the only
one that came to help me. If it had not been for
you, I should be there still!”
The bag-affair is quite an old one now—a
fortnight old. The bag itself has, I believe,
retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor
is it much more likely to reissue thence than was
one of the frail nuns built into the wall in the old
times likely to come stepping out again. Bobby
has at length ceased to offer me every object which
it devolves upon him to hand me, with a quavering
voice and a prolonged stammer, since, though I was
at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense,
I am now becoming hornily hard and indifferent
to it. We have stepped over the boundaries of
June into July.
Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers,
wherever—since they say nothing is ever
really lost—they lie with their stored sweets.
To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any
one of my nineteen.
Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home—his
home, that is—but rather diffidently and
tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the proposal
will meet with favor in my eyes. He need not be
nervous on this point. I, too, am rather anxious
and eager to see my house—my house,
if you please!—I, who have never hitherto
possessed any larger residence than a doll’s
house, whose whole front wall opened at once, giving
one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range,
best four-poster, and drawing-room chairs. I
have, it is true, seen photographs of my new house,
photographs of its east front, of its west front—photographs,
in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens,
of its woody pool—but, to tell you the truth,
I want to see it. I have already planned a
house-warming, and invited them all to it, a house-warming
in which—oh, absurd!—I
shall sit at the head of the table, and father and
mother only at the sides—I shall
tell the people who they are to take in to dinner,
and nod my head from the top when dessert is ended.
To-day lam going to write and secure the Brat’s
company—that is, later in the day—but
now it is quite, quite, early, even the letters
have not come in. We have all—viz.,
the boys, the girls, and I—risen (in pursuance
of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost
as early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going
out to gather mushrooms in the meadow, by the river.
Indignation against the inhabitants of the neighboring
town is what has torn us from our morning dreams,
the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion,
we have found our meadow rifled before we could reach
it. To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal
terms. We are all rather gapy at first, more
especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the
greater part of his toilet till his return, looks
disheveled, and sounds grumbling But before long both
gapes and grumbles depart.
