At last he appeared unexpectedly at my horse’s shoulder.
“I was thinking that you must be dead for want of your tea. I’ve just ordered some at Reardon’s, and you must come and drink it before we go home.”
I assented without much interest, and began to push Blackthorn through the crowd. At the hotel I dismounted, and followed Willy listlessly into the dark, unsavoury commercial room, the only available apartment in which we could have tea. Its sole occupant got up in obedience to a whisper from the boots, and hurriedly conveyed himself and his glass of whiskey and water from the room which had been allotted to him and the gentlemen of his profession, and I sat down at the long oil-cloth-covered table and began to pour out the tea, while Willy battered the fire into a blaze. He had evidently made up his mind to be cheerful, but as evidently he was not quite certain as to what to talk about.
I listened with as much intelligence as I could muster to such pieces of news as he had picked up during his shopping, but our conversation gradually slackened, and finally came to a full stop. I slowly drank the contents of my enormous teacup, wondering why it was that at country hotels the bread and butter and the china were alike abnormally thick. I noticed that Willy had looked at me undecidedly once or twice during the last few minutes, and at length he said, in a way that showed he had been framing the question for some time—
“I suppose, if you went to America, you’d be coming back again?”
“Come back!” I echoed. “No, I do not think there is the least chance of my doing that.”
I had finished my tea, and got up as I spoke.
“Then you’ve done with the old country altogether?”
“Yes; altogether,” I answered resolutely, turning aside to study one of the oleographs on the walls.
I could not have said another word, but, in a sort of defiance of my own weakness, I began to hum a tune, one that had been in my mind unrecognized all day. Now as I hummed it the straining sweetness of the notes of a violin filled my memory, and I knew where and how I had heard it last.