We march on in solemn silence, not particularly pleased with each other. I am staring about me, with as greedily wondering eyes as if I were a young nun let loose for the first time. We pass a score—twoscore, threescore, perhaps—of happy parties, soldiers again, a bourgeois family of three generations, the old grandmother with a mushroom-hat tied over her cap—soldiers and Fräuleins coketteering. The air comes to our faces, dry, warm, and elastic, yet freshened by the river, far down in whose quiet heart all the lamps are burning again.
"Have you been here long?" says Mr. Musgrave, presently, in a formal voice, from which I see that resentment is not yet absent.
"Yes," say I, having on the other hand fully recovered my good-humor, "a good while—that is, not very long—three, four, three whole days."
"Do you call that a good while?"
"It seems more," reply I, looking frankly back at him in the lamplight, and thinking that he cannot be much older than Algy, and that, in consequence, it is rather a comfort not to be obliged to feel the slightest respect for him.
"And how long have you been abroad altogether?"
We have reached the flower-lamps. We are standing by the bed in which they are supposed to grow. There are half a dozen of them: a fuchsia, a convolvulus, lilies.
"I do not think much of them," say I, disparagingly, kneeling down to examine them. "What a villainous rose! It is like an artichoke!"
"I told you you would not like them," he says, not looking at the flowers, but switching a little stick nonchalantly about; then, after a moment: "How long did you say you had been abroad?"
"You asked me that before," reply I, sharply, rising from my knees, and discovering that the evening grass has left a disfiguring green trace on my smart trousseau gown.