They surveyed each other with amused glances. Both were very fair, there was no doubt about it. Over their cheeks Jack Frost had drawn his finger. They had the brilliant coloring, the light in the eye that comes to those in perfect health.
“My blood is dancing in my veins,” said Stargarde; “and yours——”
“It dances also,” said Vivienne demurely.
“Then we will remain out a little longer,” said Stargarde; “as good as the air may be in the house it is always better out of doors.”
“Please continue talking to me about your theories with regard to the poor,” said Vivienne earnestly.
Stargarde pinched her cheek, then nothing loath entered upon a discussion of various philanthropic schemes where Vivienne, she knew, would follow her with interest. Occasionally, however, her glance wandered to the washhouse, and Vivienne knew that she was thinking of the ex-soldier.
MacDaly was not thinking of his kind patroness. He was lower down in the town, just steering his way out of a low drinking shop, and in a slow and interlaced fashion wandering down the street while he communed with himself after the following manner: “If I were making an observation on the subject ’twould be on the effect of the curiosity of the subject. That whereas and however, in some human creatures, liquor flies to the head, in sundry other and divers intelligent cases, it takes the opposite direction and bewilders the feet. On the present occasion, my head or head-piece, otherwise known as pate, noddle, or skull, is perspicacious and discriminating—acute and high in tone as usual. I feel that I could sing were there any one to hear,” and lifting up his voice he began to warble discordantly and with a vainglorious and martial accent:
“’Tis the flag of Old England.”
Pride will have a fall, and by reason of too much attention given to the head, the feet got beyond control, and MacDaly shortly found himself in the gutter.
Halifax people, no matter how great a fall of snow they have, immediately begin to dig trenches through it in preparation for the thaw which they know is sure to come. In one of these hollowed-out beds—no unpleasant resting-place for a warmly clad man who had just come from a heated saloon—Derrick Edward Fitz-James O’Grady MacDaly, old soldier, Irish Nova Scotian, loafer, drunkard, lecturer, merrymaker, and character well known about the town, reposed, till he was discovered by two small boys who happened to be passing up the street.