"Dear Dresden!" say I, pensively, with a sigh of mixed regret and remorse, as I look back on the sunshiny hours that at the time I thought so long, in that fair, white foreign town.
"Dear Linkesches Bad!" says Frank, sighing too.
"Dear Groosegarten!" cry I, thinking of the long pottering stroll that Roger and I had taken one evening up and down its green alleys, and that then I had found so tedious.
"Dear Zwinger!" retorts Frank.
"Dear Weisserhirsch!" say I, half sadly. "Dear white acacias! dear drives under the acacias!"
"Drives under the acacias!" echoes Frank, dropping his accent of sentimentalism, and speaking rather sharply. "We never had any drives under the acacias! We never had any drives at all, that I recollect!"
"You had not, I dare say," reply I, carelessly, "but we had. They are the things that I look back at with the greatest pleasure of any thing that happened there!"
Frank does not apostrophize as "dear" any other public resort; indeed, he turns away his head, and we walk on without uttering a word for a few moments.
"By-the-by," say I, with a labored and not altogether successful attempt at appearing to speak with suddenness and want of premeditation, "what did you mean this morning, about that la—about Mrs. Huntley?"
"I meant nothing," he answers, but the faint quiver of a smile about his mouth contradicts his words.