CHAPTER XXIII
ON THE WALL
Smith retired to his room to bathe, clothed himself in snowy linen and fresh tennis flannels, and descended again, book under his arm, to saunter forth through heavy tangles of cinnamon-tinted Flemish roses and great sweet-scented peonies, musing on love and fate.
"Kingsbury and his theories! The Countess of Semois will think him crazy. She'll think us both crazy! And I am not sure that we're not; youth is madness; half the world is lunatic! Take me, for example; I never did a more unexpected thing than kissing that shadow across the wall. I don't know why, I don't know how, but I did it; and I am out of jail yet. Certainly it must have been the cook. Oh, Heavens! If cooks kiss that way, what, what must the indiscretion of a Countess resemble?... She did kiss back.... At least there was a soft, tremulous, perfumed flutter—a hint of delicate counter-pressure——"
But he had arrived at the wall by that time.
"How like a woodland paradise!" he murmured sentimentally, youthful face upraised to the trees. "How sweet the zephyr! How softly sing the dicky-birds! I wonder—I wonder—" But what it was that perplexed him he did not say; he stood eying the top of the wall as the furtive turkey eyes its selected roost before coyly hopping thither.