“Will the cylinder hat be abolished?”
“Shall we still travel by steam, or only by electricity?”
“What gun-maker will be in vogue?”
“What kind of lap-dog will be the rage?”
In this wise they dawdled an hour away, having garden and arbour all to themselves, till after three o’clock, when a couple of Bounder-laden boats came noisily to the reedy bank, and their human cargo landed, scrambling upon shore, hilarious, exploding into joyous cockney jests, with the true South London twang.
“Come,” said Vansittart, “it is time we were off.”
“Are you sure you have rested?”
“From my Herculean labours? Yes.”
They drifted down the river, praising or dispraising the villas on the Middlesex shore, inhaling the sweetness of flowering clover from the Surrey fields; he leaning lazily on his sculls, she prattling to him, as much lovers as in the outset of their wooing; and so to Teddington Lock, where they had to wait for a boat to come out, before their boat went in.
It was the laziest hour of the day, and scarcely a leaf stirred among the willows on the eyot hard by. There was only the sound of the water, and the voices of the rowers, muffled by the heavy wooden gates and high walls of the smaller lock. Suddenly the doors opened. A skiff with four passengers slowly emerged from the yawning darkness, and a voice, strong, yet silvery sweet, broke upon the quiet of the scene, a voice at whose first word Vansittart started as if he had been shot.