“Why, Dick,” she said, “this is delightful! I thought you had gone abroad?”
“So I was going,” responded Dick—otherwise Major Desmond, advancing to take Miss Letty’s outstretched hand and raise it gallantly to his lips,—“but just as I was about to start, I read in the newspapers of a fellow—a man who was once in my regiment—who had got insulted by a dirty ragamuffin of a chap in the Custom-house on the French frontier,—and I said to myself—‘What!—am I going out of England to be treated as if I were a thief, and have my portmanteau searched by a Frenchy? No!—as an English officer I won’t submit to it! I will stay at home!’ It was a sudden resolution. You know I’m a fellow to make sudden resolutions, am’t I, Letty? Well, give you my word, I never looked upon Custom-house regulations in the same light as I do now! Come to think of it, you know, directly we leave our own shores we’re treated like thieves and rascals by all the foreigners,—and why should we expose ourselves to it? Eh? I say why?”
Miss Leslie laughed.
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know why,” she answered. “Only I rather wonder you never thought of all this before. You have always gone abroad some time in the year, you know.”
The Major pulled his white moustache thoughtfully.
“Yes, I have,” he admitted. “And why the devil—I beg your pardon!—I have done it I can’t imagine. England’s good enough for anybody. There’s too much gadding about everywhere nowadays. And the world seems to me to shrink in consequence. Shrink! by Jove!—it’s no bigger than a billiard ball!”
Miss Letty smiled, and said “Sweet!” to her bullfinch, which straightway warbled with delightful inaccuracy the quaint air of “The Whistling Coon.”
“Bravo! Bravo!” exclaimed Major Desmond, after listening attentively to the little bird’s performance. “Now why the chap couldn’t do that for me I can’t understand. I have been chirruping to him till my tongue aches—and couldn’t get a note out of him. Only a wink. You just say ‘sweet’ and off he starts. Well, and what have you been doing with yourself, Letty? You look very fit.”
“Oh, I’m always ‘fit’ as you call it,” said Miss Leslie placidly. “I live the same quiet life month after month, you know, and I suppose it’s scarcely possible for anything to go very wrong with me. I have passed through my storm and stress. The days go by now all in the same even, monotonous way.”
Major Desmond took two or three turns up and down the room.