"You like going about!" he said.
"O yes, indeed."
"Well—we'll do Westminster Abbey some day. Monuments worth looking at there."
Dorothea thought they were worth looking at in St. Paul's. She would have liked to dream over each in succession, and to spend a quiet hour studying the outlines of the great expanse:—not a solitary hour, for she had too much of solitude, but a quiet reverent hour, with her father by her side, feeling—if that had been possible—that he felt with her.
Colonel Tracy's notions of "doing a cathedral" admitted of no dreams. He whisked his daughter through the aisles and past the monuments in the most approved British style. "That's so-and-so, my dear; and that's so-and-so," came in quick succession. The whispering gallery was remarkable in his estimation—"best thing in the Cathedral," he asserted.
Reaching home before five o'clock, they were met in the hall by Mrs. Stirring. "There's been callers, Miss," the little woman said, swelling with gratification. "Callers, Miss—a lady and a gentleman. And they come together, and the lady she was that disappointed to find you out. I did say it was a thousand pities, for you wasn't scarcely never out, and such a dull life too! And she hopes you'll be sure and go to see her, Miss Tracy."
Dorothea took up the cards from the hall slab, following her father into the dining-room. "Mrs. Effingham," she said. "I wish I had been at home. To think that she should have come this day of all days! Father, Mrs. Effingham has called—the lady who slipped down on Christmas Day. Don't you remember—I told you?"
The Colonel's recollections of his over-boiled turkey were vivid: not so his recollections of the cause.
"Eh, what? Somebody slipped down?"
"On Christmas Day, just before dinner; don't you remember?"