"I think you are an angel out of Heaven," cried Anthony, with ardour. "If you could know the load you have lifted from my heart, the balm you have poured into it."
"If you have n't wealth," Miss Sandus went on, summing the issue up, "you have a good position and—a beau nom. You have more than one indeed, if all I hear be true. You 're both of the old religion, you 're both at the mating age. In every way it would be a highly suitable match. Wait for a good occasion—occasion's everything. Wait for—what does the poet say?—for the time and the place and the loved one all together, and tell her that you love her. And now—here comes the tea."
And with the tea came Susanna, in a wonderful rustling blue-grey confection of the material that is known, I believe, as voile; and immediately after Susanna, Adrian.
XIV
Adrian was clearly in a state of excitement. His hair was ruffled, his pink face showed a deeper flush, his lips were parted, his bosom heaved.
He halted near the threshold, he threw up his hands, he rolled his eyes, he nodded. It was patent that something had happened.
"Oh, my dears! my dears!" he gasped.
His dears attended, curious, expectant. But as he stood silent, and merely cast intensely significant glances from one to the other, and thence to the walls and ceiling, Anthony, constituting himself spokesman for the company, asked, "Well—? What's the row?"
"Oh, my dears!" Adrian repeated, and advanced a few steps further into the room, his hands still raised.
"What is it?" besought Susanna, breathless.