“I own to a liking for the game. I play with Mr. Crowther and his youngest daughter whenever I dine at Glenaveril. Alicia is a very fine player, for a girl, and her father plays a good game.”
“Then you will come up to the Mount two or three times a week and play with me, I hope. There’s a decent table—cushions as hard as bricks, I dare say, but we must make the best of it—and there’s plenty of sound claret in the cellars to say nothing of a keg or two of Schiedam that I sent home from the Hague.”
“Mr. Colfox will not make much impression either on your claret or your schnapps,” said Disney, laughing. “He is almost as temperate as one of those terrible anchorites in the novel we were reading the other day—’Homo Sum.’”
“I am glad you put in the qualifying ‘almost,’” said the curate, “for I hope to taste Captain Hulbert’s Schiedam.”
The captain expatiated upon what his three new friends—and his one old friend, Martin Disney—were to do to cheer him in his solitude at the Mount.
“There is nothing of the anchorite about me,” he said. “I love society, I love life and movement, I love bright faces.”
He would not leave until they had all promised to take tea on board the yacht on the following afternoon, an engagement which was kept by Allegra and the colonel; but not by Isola, whose headache was worse after the little dinner-party; nor by the curate, who had parish business to detain him on shore.
“UNDER THE PINE-WOOD, BLIND WITH BOUGHS.”