"I have—heaps," he laughed, delighted at her innocence. "I had an idea we might do something, you know. Now then, here we are. You must jump out, if you don't mind."
They walked up and down the centre arcade, looking in at the shops, as happy and as guileless as Adam and Eve in the first garden when the world was all their own. They chose a stack of flowers, as Tom called it; he filled Margaret's arms with them just for the pleasure of looking at her.
"You make quite a picture loaded with them," he said. "Look here, I should like to give you some roses, too, if you will have them?" he said, almost humbly. "We get them in London, you see, before you do in the country; and I want you to take some back with you."
"I should like to take my mother some," she answered, quite unconscious, of course, of their value.
"Good! You shall take her a heap from us both—I should like to send her some, if I may. But they shall meet you at Waterloo in a box, then they'll be fresh at the last moment."
Margaret felt, as they drove on again, as if she had found a playfellow, a comrade, some one who made life a wholly different thing. She had never been on equal terms with any one young before—with any one at all who laughed and chattered and looked at the world from the same stand-point as she felt that she and Tom did, though till yesterday she had not set eyes on him. It was a new delight that the world had suddenly sprung upon her. This was what it was like to be a boy and girl together, to have a brother, to have friends, what it would be like if some day in the future she were married: people went about then laughing and talking and delighting in being together. Oh, that wonderful word together!
"We won't go to the Abbey," Tom said, "because you did that yesterday, and before we inspect the House of Commons—"
"Some day you will be there!"
"Some day I shall be there," he echoed; "but before I show you the identical seat in which it is my ambition to sit, we'll get rid of these flowers. Great College Street is here, just round the corner. I wonder if she's at home. Jolly little street, isn't it? with its low houses on one side and the old wall on the other."