“Good! But I dare swear that it will be bad enough to keep me awake. You know that extremes meet in the case of books, as well as other matters; one keeps awake reading a good book, in expectancy of its undeveloped goodness; and reading a bad one, wondering how far the author can actually go in point of dullness.”
“I have often thought that; but Susy has sent only two of the three volumes.”
“So that we shall not be able to fathom the full depth of the author’s dullness? We should be grateful to Susy—so should the author. Well, you shall begin after tea, while there is yet daylight: Le livre ne vaut pas la chandelle.”
“Nous verrons,” cried Fanny.
And she started reading the book that same day, an hour before sunset. The room in which they sat was a small one with a window facing the west and overlooking a long stretch of billowy common. The spicy scent of the wallflowers in the little garden patch at the side of the house was wafted through the half-open lattice, and occasionally there came the sound of the ducks gabbling at the pool beyond the gate that shut off the house from the lane. It was a cloudless evening, and the sunset promised to be peach-like in its tender tints of pink and saffron with the curves of delicate green in the higher sky. Fanny sat at the window and the old man reclined at his ease upon the sofa.
“I am giving myself every chance,” he said. “All that I ask of you, my Fannikin, is that you do not glance at me every now and again to see if I am still awake. If you do so, I shall never yield to so much as a doze.”
“I promise faithfully to await your signal that you are alert,” said she.
And so began one of the most delightful hours of her life.
She was not a particularly good reader aloud when a book was casually put into her hands, but here she had before her a volume that she could almost have repeated verbatim, so that she soon found that she was just too fluent: she felt that if she went on at this rate his critical ear would tell him that she had every page by heart, and he would ask her for an explanation of so singular a thing as her being able to repeat so much of a book which she professed to have in her hands for the first time. She put a check upon her fluency, and though she did not go so far as to simulate stumbling over certain words, she neglected the punctuation now and again, and then went back upon some of the passages, causing him to give a little grumble and say:
“Be careful, my dear; there’s no need for haste: the evening is still young.”