Mrs. Sampson's shrill apologies for the absence of cake having been received, she hopped out of the room, and Madge made the tea. The service was a quaint Chinese one, which Brian had picked up in his wanderings. He used it only on special occasions. As he watched Madge he could not help thinking how pretty she looked, with her hands moving deftly among the cups and saucers, so bizarre-looking with their sprawling dragons of yellow and green. He half smiled to himself as he thought, "If they knew all, I wonder if they would sit with me so unconcernedly."
Mr. Frettlby, too, as he looked at his daughter, thought of his dead wife and sighed.
"Well," said Madge, as she handed them their tea, and helped herself to some thin bread and butter, "you two gentlemen are most delightful company—papa is sighing like a furnace, and Brian is staring at me with his eyes like blue china saucers. You ought both to be turned forth to funerals like melancholy."
"Why like melancholy?" queried Brian, lazily.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald," said the young lady with a smile in her pretty black eyes, "that you are not a student of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'"
"Very likely not," answered Brian; "midsummer out here is so hot that one gets no sleep, and, consequently no dreams. Depend upon it, if the four lovers whom Puck treated so badly had lived in Australia they wouldn't have been able to sleep for the mosquitoes."
"What nonsense you two young people do talk," said Mr. Frettlby, with an amused smile, as he stirred his tea.
"Dulce est desipere in loco," observed Brian, gravely, "a man who can't carry out that observation is sure not to be up to much."
"I don't like Latin," said Miss Frettlby, shaking her pretty head. "I agree with Heine's remark, that if the Romans had been forced to learn it they would not have found time to conquer the world."
"Which was a much more agreeable task," said Brian.