"I will forgive you, Mr. Coristine," she replied, recovering from her serious fit, and looking at the victim in a way that blended amusement with imperiousness: "I will forgive you this once, if you promise future good behaviour."
An impulse came over the lawyer to shake Miss Carmichael's hand, but she made him no shadow of an excuse for so doing. It was plain that the mutual confidences of the girls, which embraced, using the word in a mere logical sense, their year long distant acquaintance with the transformed pedestrians had given maturity to the closer and more pleasant acquaintance of the day. Little Marjorie's appropriation of the lawyer as her Eugene added another ripening element to its growth; so that the two garden explorers felt none of the stiffness and uncertainty of a first introduction. What Miss Carmichael's thoughts were she only could tell, but she knew that the impetuous and affectionate Coristine required the merest trifle of encouragement to change the steady decorous tide of advancing knowledge and respect into an abruptly awkward cataract, threatening the rupture of pleasant relations or the loss of self-respect. She would have preferred talking with Wilkinson, as a check upon the fervour of his friend, but, although she laughed at the dominie's culpable ignorance of her city existence, in her secret soul it piqued her not a little. No; she would rather take refuge with the clergy, Mr. Errol or Mr. Perrowne.
Many roses were still in bloom, but, spite of many hints, Coristine's button hole remained empty. He admired the pinks, the carnations, the large-eyed pansies, "like Shakespeare's winking Mary-buds," he said, but all in vain, save a civil answer. The Day-lilies and the sweet-scented pure white and Japan lilies, the early Phloxes, the Honeysuckles against the arbours, and many other floral beauties he stopped to inspect, and wondered if Mrs. Carruthers would mind his gathering a few, although the house was full of flowers. His companion did not satisfy his wonder, only answering that she thought flowers looked so much better growing. Then he pulled himself together, and answered naturally, joking on the tall Scarlet Lychnis, now almost a garden flower of the past, which boys call scarlet likeness and scarlet lightning, and ran on into accounts of botanical rambles, descriptions of curious plants, with here a little bit of reverent natural theology, and there an appropriate scrap from some flower loving poet, or a query as to where the worshippers of Wordsworth had got, if they had left "The Excursion" for the smaller pieces on the Daisy, and the Celandine, the Broom, the Thorn and the Yew. In thus talking he gained his end without knowing it, for, instead of a mere routine lawyer and impulsive Irishman, Miss Carmichael found in her companion an intelligent, thoughtful, and cultured acquaintance, whose society she thoroughly enjoyed. Occasionally an unconscious and half-timid lifting of her long eye-lashes towards his animated, handsome face thrilled the botanist with a new, if fleeting, sensation of delight. As they passed through a gate into a hillside meadow, at the foot of which ran a silvery brook, they were made aware of voices in song. The voices were two, one a sweet but somewhat drawly female soprano, the other, a raucous, loud, overmastering shout, that almost drowned the utterance of its companion. The masculine one furnished the words to the promenaders, and these were:—
Shayll we gaythurr at thee rivverr
Whayerr bright angel feet have traw-odd?
"Do you know who these are?" asked Miss Carmichael.
"If I thought he knew as much tune," replied Coristine, "I should say he was The Crew."
"Oh, tell me, please, who is The Crew?" Thereupon the lawyer launched out into a description of his travels, so comical a one that his fair companion laughed until the tears stood in her eyes, and she accused him of making her break the Sabbath. "No," she said at last; "that is not Sylvanus, but it is his brother Timotheus with Tryphosa. They are sitting in a ferny hollow under these birches down the hill, with a hymn-book between them, and as grave as if they were in church. Do you not think, Mr. Coristine, that that is a very nice and proper way for young people to improve their acquaintance?"
"Very much so, Miss Carmichael. May I go in and get a hymn book? I can run like a deer, and won't take a minute over it. One will be enough, won't it?"
The lady laughed a little pleasant laugh, and replied: "I think not, sir. We are not servants, at least in the same sense, and the piano and organ are at our disposal when we wish to exercise our musical powers."