"If you please, Miss Margaret, Mrs. Rutherford has sent me to look for you."
"Yes, I know; I am late to-night, I will come in now."
"There's no occasion for haste," Celestine answered, bestowing a short glance of general inspection upon the lagoon, the tinted sky, and the stiff figure of the crane. "What a pagan bird that crane is!"
"You hear, Carlos?" said Margaret.
But Carlos was never conscious of the existence of Celestine, he kept his attentions exclusively for his southern friends; the only exception was Margaret, whose presence he was now beginning to tolerate.
"You don't call that mocking-bird a pagan, do you?" Margaret asked.
"I don't care much for mocking-birds myself," Celestine responded. "Give me a bobolink, Miss Margaret! As for them leaves you've got there—all the sweet-smelling things in Florida—I'd trade the whole for one sniff of the laylocks that used to grow in our backyard when I was a girl."
"Why, Minerva, you're homesick."
"No, Miss Margaret, no; I've got my work to attend to here; no, I ain't homesick: you get home knocked out of you when you've traipsed about to such places as Nice, Rome, Egypt, and the dear knows where. But if anybody was really going to live somewheres (I don't mean just staying, as we're doing now), talk about choosing between this and New England—my!"
Margaret rose.