“How I hate girls who cry!” she said. “It is so dreadfully feeble! Look, Mike, there are some roses on that tree from which I plucked the one you didn’t think much of. Do you remember? You crushed it up in my hand and made it bleed.”
He smiled.
“I have got some faint recollection of it,” he said.
Sylvia had got hold of her courage again.
“Have you?” she asked. “What a wonderful memory. And that quiet evening out here next day. Perhaps you remember that too. That was real: that was a possession that we shan’t ever part with.”
She pointed with her finger.
“You and I sat there, and Hermann there,” she said. “And mother sat—why, there she is. Mother darling, let’s have tea out here, shall we? I will go and tell them.”
Mrs. Falbe had drifted out in her usual thistledown style, and shook hands with Michael.
“What an upset it all is,” she said, “with all these dreadful rumours going about that we shall be at war. I fell asleep, I think, a little after lunch, when I could not attend to my book for thinking about war.”
“Isn’t the book interesting?” asked Michael.