The Canon had arrived late on Saturday evening, and he and his wife had had a great deal to talk about. His life on the sea had made quite a sailor of him, and when they sat in his study after dinner, he had been distinctly nautical. The double herbaceous bed, lying on each side of the path, for instance, had been under discussion, and when Canon Alington asked whether the delphiniums on the left of the path were getting on well, he alluded to the left as the port side. He corrected her, too, about the position of a purple clematis whose health had been indifferent when he went away. There were several climbing up the trellis work behind the bower, but the starboard clematis was the one he was anxious about. “Just close to the gate,” he said—“forward on the starboard. I shall have a lot of leeway to make up next week. And is everything a-low and aloft drawing well?”
Agnes moved from the sofa where she sat to a chair close at his elbow.
“Ah! that’s more ship-shape, dear,” said Canon Alington. “Now, do you know, though it all looks so smooth, hasn’t the glass fallen with you, somehow, Agnes, since I went away? But your skipper is ready, dear; give him his orders.”
“I am rather troubled,” said she.
“I knew it. Now, what about?”
“About Edith. She was going to read a paper, you know, next week at the Literific.”
“And can’t she?” asked Dick, searching in his mind for a subject on which he might be able to “knock them up something” to take the place of Edith’s paper. He found, even before Agnes answered, that the Literific need have no anxiety as to a postponed meeting, for he had enjoyed many hours of fruitful meditation on the yacht.
“Yes, she can. That is just it,” said Agnes. “She has told me what the subject of the paper is to be. Oh, Dick——”
Canon Alington held up his hand to stop her. It was a rule of the Literific that the subject of the paper should not be public property until the notice of the meeting was sent out by the secretary, who was Mrs. Alington. Consequently until the Canon received his card (headed by a facsimile of an Athenian coin with the owl of Pallas lithographed on it), bearing in his wife’s neat handwriting the date of the meeting, the name of the lecturer, and the subject of the lecture, he had no business to know what it was to be. So he held up his hand.
“You have not sent out the cards yet?” he asked.