“He needn’t make love at the dinner table,” I said. “Besides, they don’t want to make love—they’ve made it already—long ago. This is more of a family reconciliation.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry for the girl. It can’t be pleasant to have a doctor and a clergyman standing like sentries on guard all the time your lover, that you haven’t seen for ever so long, is in the room with you.”
“How did you think they were going to meet, pray?” I asked.
“Well, seeing he’s a play-actor, I expected that he’d come outside our house when it was moonlight, and whistle, and that the young lady would open the windows and go out on the balcony, and that they’d talk low, like that.”
I saw what was in Harry’s head at once. It was that beautiful play about Romeo and Juliet. So I said, “A very likely thing. As if a young lady, brought up like Miss Elmore, and in her delicate state of health, would go talking to a man in the road, standing outside the balcony of a public-house. A nice scandal there would be!”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve seen it done on the stage.”
“I dare say; but there’s lots of things that are all right on the stage, but would get parties into trouble if they tried them in real life.”
What an idea, wasn’t it, that we were to have “Romeo and Juliet” played outside the ‘Stretford Arms’? Of course it would have been much more romantic. “Romeo and Juliet” wouldn’t be half so interesting if Juliet was only allowed to see her lover at dinner, with her mother and the doctor and the clergyman sitting down at the same table. Poor girl, if she had, perhaps it would have been much better for her in the long-run. She might have been a happy wife and mother, instead of coming to that creepy end in the family vault, and leading to such a lot of bloodshed.
I was on tiptoe all day, as the saying is, till the young lover arrived. I arranged a very nice little dinner and made up some flowers for the table, and saw to everything myself, being determined that nothing should be wanting on my part in bringing matters to a happy termination, and I know how much a good dinner has to do with the turn that things take.
The only time I can remember Harry to have spoken really unkindly to me was when we had a badly-made steak-and-kidney pie for dinner, and he wasn’t very well after it, and that made him tetchy and irritable, a most unusual thing for him, and he was quite nasty with me and lost his temper over a trifle that, if the steak-and-kidney pie had been all right, he would only have laughed at.