"Don't insult me, Ted! Look—that grey! Oh, he's a beauty!"
"Put on the pace," Ted said to the man, and presently Nell was sighing with joy.
"I'd love to spend a whole day in hansoms! Ted, the moral's all wrong! I'm enjoying myself much too much. And never so much as one 'I-told-you-so' glance from you! It's hopelessly wrong!"
As they turned into Henley Road, she held out her hand.
"Shake," she said, "and—I'm not going to thank you, but—oh, Teddie, you are a brick!"
CHAPTER XXVIII
Towards morning on March 17 Miss Kezia dreamed. She was not often troubled with dreams, but on this occasion her dream was long and peculiarly vivid. She dreamed that she was passing through a narrow roadway, on either side of which great rocks rose high and precipitous. On these rocks men were at work, cutting, chiselling, hammering, and every sound they made rolled and rumbled and echoed amongst the rocks, till, in her dream, Miss Kezia's ears sang and buzzed in agony. As they worked the men sang and talked, and the rocks took up their voices, and flung them from one to another, till the noise was deafening. On she hurried, striving to get through the roadway, but it had the interminableness of dream roads, and Miss Kezia struggled in vain.
At seven o'clock she woke, because seven o'clock was the hour at which she invariably rose. On the 17th of March she rose four minutes later than usual, taking that time to ponder her dream and feel her pulse. She looked anxiously at herself in the peculiarly unflattering mirror on the toilet-table, but it showed her the same long Scotch face as usual, and the green tinge imparted by the glass was no greener than it always was. Miss Kezia considered dreams a weakness due to illness or a diseased imagination, but halfway through her toilet a voice broke out:—
"'Oh! Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground;
Saint Patrick's day no more we'll keep, his colour can't be seen.
For there's a cruel law agin' the wearin' of the green....'"
Miss Kezia stood, the cold water trickling down her face, and experienced a queer sort of sensation. Where had she heard that tune—sad even to her tough senses—quite lately? Why did her dream suddenly descend upon her, the sense of it gripping her most unaccountably?