"Yes—your poor father," says Dicky Browne sotto voce, feelingly and in a tone rich with delicate encouragement.
"Thank you. Half a glass please. I—I never take more," say Portia, hastily but sweetly, to Sir Christopher, who is bent on giving her a goodly share of what he believes to be her heart's desire. Then she drinks it to please him, and smiles faintly behind her fan and tells herself Dicky Browne is the very oddest boy she has ever met in her life, and amusing, if a little troublesome.
Sir Christopher once roused, chatters on ceaselessly about the old days when he and Charles Vibart, her father, were boys together, and before pretty Clara Blount fell in love with Vibart and married him. And Portia listens dreamily, and gazing through the open window lets part of the music of the scene outside sink into his ancient tales, and feels a great longing rise within her to get up and go out into the mystic moonbeams, and bathe her tired hands and forehead in their cool rays.
Dulce and Roger are, as usual, quarreling in a deadly, if carefully-subdued fashion. Dicky Browne, as usual, too, is eating anything and everything that comes within his reach, and is apparently supremely happy. At this moment Portia's longing having mastered her, she turns to Dulce and asks softly:
"What is that faint streak of white I see out there, through, and beyond, the branches?"
"Our lake," says Dulce, half turning her head in its direction.
"Our pond," says Roger, calmly.
"Our lake," repeats Dulcinea, firmly; at which Portia, feeling war to be once more imminent, says hastily—
"It looks quite lovely from this—so faint, so silvery."
"It shows charmingly when the moon is up, through that tangled mass of roses, far down there," says Dulce, with a gesture toward the tangle.