“Next, how came you in this lonely place, with these pretty playthings about you? How came you in my garden here, where I thought nothing but silence and sadness grew?”
“Your garden! What hole in our outer fences gave you that warrant, Sir?” queried the young lady, with a toss of her head. “How long user of trespass makes that right presumptive? Faith! until you spoke I thought the garden was mine and my father’s!” and the young lady, for such I now acknowledged her to be, looked extremely haughty.
“What! Hast thou, then, a father?”
“Yes, Sir. Is it so unusual with our kind that you should be surprised?”
“And who is thy father?”
“A very learned man indeed, Sir; one who hath more wit in his little finger than another brave gentleman will have in all his body. Of nature so courteous that he instinctively would respect the privacy of a neighbor’s property and manners, so finished he would never stay a maiden at her morning walk to bandy idle questions with her all out of vanity of black curled hair and a new, mayhap unpaid-for, yellow suit. If you had no more to ask me, Sir, I think, I would wish you good-day.”
“But stay a minute. It seems to me I might know thy father; and this is the very point and center of my inquisitiveness.”
“If you did, it were much to your advantage, but I doubt it. He is recluse and grave, not given to chance companions, or, in fact, to friend with any but some one or two.”
“Ah! that may well be so,” I said thoughtlessly, speaking with small consideration and recalling the vision of my ancient host just as it came to me—“a sour, wizened old carl, clad in rusty green, a-straddle of a spavined, ragged palfrey; mean-seeming, morose, and sullen—why, maid, is that thy father?”
“No, Sir!”