"How beautiful——" thus he began to murmur once again, when his mistress's little hand, twitching impatiently from his grasp, surprised him into silence.
"Oh dear! a calf in very truth," thought she. "Baah—baa ooh.... What can I have seen in him? 'Twas a sudden pastoral yearning....!"
"May I not hold your hand?" said he, shifting himself to his silken knees and pressing against her.
Yet he was a pretty boy and there was a charm undoubted in the freshness of this innocence and youth awakening to the first glimmer of man's passion.
"Delightful task——" she quoted under her breath, and once more vouchsafed him, with a sweep like the poise of a dove, her gentle hand.
As it lay in his brown fingers, she contemplated it with artistic satisfaction and played her little digits up and down, admiring the shape and colour of the nails, the delicate dimples at the knuckles. But Lord Verney's great boy's paw engulfed them all too quickly, and his brown eyes never wavered from their devout contemplation of her countenance.
"How——"
Mistress Kitty sprang to her feet.
"I vow," she cried, "'tis my hour for the waters, and I had clean forgot them!"
She called upon her maid: