“I feel crushed,” pouted Mrs. Bolingbroke. “How should I, who've never met Henry Pontycroft—know he's the paragon of wit and chivalry?”
“That's precisely what Henry Pontycroft is,” her husband answered gravely, “He is the paragon of wit and chivalry!”
These young folk were pacing side by side in the moonlit garden after the excellent New England repast, called supper; while Miss Adgate and her uncle were busy with callers, upon the veranda. The night was the first of a long series of warm May nights, the moon hung, majestic and round, over the fringes of wood termed the Wigwam. A rustic bench stood invitingly under the big syringa, now a perfumed canopy of white. As they stood on the upper terrace it was easy to distinguish descending terraces marked by rows of silvery budding irises swollen or in bloom.... The magic smells of white and purple lilac were touched with a whiff of apple blossoms from the hill and beyond—below—the Mantic gleamed in the moonlight amid trees all a feathery, spring incrustation of minute green foliage.
“This is a divine spot,” said Bolingbroke, suddenly kissing his wife, “but we must rejoin the others.”
Lucilla Dor and Harry Pontycroft arrived the following day and were installed in the Morris House at the other side of the hill, where two neat Irish girls waited upon them under the enlightening, tempered instruction of Pontycroft's man and of Lucilla's maid.
V
Spring was abroad in her witchery. She had come with a rush, with a good will, with an—abundance, 'and all of a sudden-like'—as she has, after many days of dallying, a way of doing in New England. She had been coy; she had flirted; she had tantalised—a day here, a day there—with dewy warmth of soft blue skies, her robes diaphanous April cloud. Then she had veiled her face, vexed for one knew not what offences,—had turned her coldest shoulder, shed her most frigid tears. She had looked forth, wreathed again in smiles, while she put wonder-working fingers to shrubs and branches... and again she had withdrawn herself in deepest greyest dudgeon.
But now, she was come, come. The birds were building and calling and fluttering, in all the emotion, the refreshing joy of an ever-renewed bridalhood. A young male wren who had discovered a bird-house, fixed on the off-chance of so happy an event as to entice him there—by Jobias, to the top of a rustic pole in the rose garden—tore his throat open in the rapture of telling the world what a place for a nest he had found, and how sweet she was.
“Shameless uxorious creature,” Ponty said, as he came over the hill and paused to listen to him.
Unaccountably enough, Ruth, as he came into the garden, Ruth issued from the house dressed in white; dressed in white, without a hat, a watteau sunshade in her hand.