Anthony sighed.
"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming. The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled from the skies."
Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain malicious satisfaction.
"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony turned up to-morrow,' said I."
"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."
"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked.
"No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "I 'll set out for the house; and you (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk and gambol round about me. Come on."
And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood—I was on the point of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?—for its quaintness, and in some measure too, perhaps, for its history:—Craford Old Manor, a red-brick Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses, rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews clipped to fantastic patterns: the house so placed withal, that, while its north front faced the park, its south front, ivy-covered, looked over a bright lawn and bright parterres of flowers, down upon the long green levels of Rowland Marshes, and away to the blue sea beyond,—the blue sea, the white cliffs, the yellow sands.
Anthony and Adrian, arm in arm, sauntered on without speaking, till they attained the crest of a sweeping bit of upland, and the house and the sea came in view. Here they halted, and stood for a minute in contemplation of the prospect.
"The sea," said Adrian, disengaging his arm, that he might be free to use it as a pointer, and then pointing with it, "the sea has put on her bluest frock, to honour your return. And behold, decked in the hues of Iris, that gallant procession of cliffs, like an army with banners, zigzagging up from the world's rim, to bid you welcome. Oh, you were clearly not unexpected. If no smoke rises from yonder chimneys,—if your ancestral chimney-stone is cold,—that's merely because, despite the season, we 're having a spell of warmish weather, and we 've let the fires go out. 'T is June. Town 's full; country 's depopulated. In Piccadilly, I gather from the public prints, vehicular traffic is painfully congested. Meanwhile, I 've a grand piece of news for your private ear. Guess a wee bit what it is."