His only answer was a faint smile. Then, after a pause, "You were reading, Adèle. Oh!" lifting the book from the small reading-table that stood conveniently near the sofa, "The Faërie Queene. I thought it would be something of the kind. Read some of it aloud, like a good girl; I'm too done up with this hot weather to talk just now."
"Poor old fellow!" Adèle smoothed back his curly hair and imprinted a kiss, that did not seem to excite her cousin particularly, between his temples. "Your forehead is so hot, dear, let me bathe it with eau-de-cologne for you."
She opened a little bottle of richly-cut, ruby-colored glass, and pouring some of its sweet contents on her handkerchief pressed it again and again to his brow, Arthur submitting with the delicate grace of an invalid.
"There," he said at last, "that'll do, dear; you can read now."
And the obedient Adèle, having first carefully lowered one of the Venetian blinds that no glare might offend her cousin's eyes, proceeded to read her favorite book in a soft, measured cadence that suited it admirably. There was no stumbling over the old English words. Adèle was so thoroughly acquainted with the style that the quaint language came naturally from her lips, even with a kind of delicate grace. Love had given her the art, for she loved, more than any book she had ever read, this dreamy, old-world poem, with its fair women, its armed knights, its dragons and its myths. Perhaps the force of contrast made these things specially dear to the young girl's soul, for there was not much romance in the fashionable life her mother taught her to think the best and wisest of all lives for a nineteenth-century young lady to lead.
Her voice sounded like the echo of a dream in the wide room, and she herself, in her light summer dress, might well have answered to the description of one of the fair "maydes" whose woes and joys the gentle poet of another age has illumined with his silvery pen, while Arthur, as he rested on the sofa in an attitude of careless grace, his dark, lazy-looking eyes half closed, his head thrown back upon the cushions, might have been one of the brave young knights refreshing himself in his lady's bower after some terrible encounter with the many-headed, many-handed monster from whom it was his grand mission to free humanity in general, fair womankind in particular.
But the afternoon wore away. Adèle had just finished the account of a mighty encounter between Arthur of the magic sword and three unknightly knights who had attacked him together.
It had apparently aroused Arthur, for he rose suddenly and stood by her side, looking down upon her with a certain earnestness.
"Shut the book for the present, Adèle," he said, "I am ready to talk now; it has awoke me."
"What has awoke you, dear?"