"The song is still ringing in my head—that's all. Send me any inexpensive thing you wish—a white carnation—I don't really care—" she looked away from him—"as long as it comes from you."
[CHAPTER X]
Desboro's guests were determined to turn the house out of the windows; its stodgy respectability incited them; every smug, smooth portrait goaded them to unusual effort, and they racked their brains to invent novelties.
On one day they opened all the windows in the disused west wing, flooded the ground floor, hung the great stone room with paper lanterns, and held an ice carnival. As masks and costumes had been made entirely out of paper, there were several startling effects and abrupt retirements to repair damages; but the dancing on skates in the lantern light was very pretty, and even the youth and pride of Westchester found the pace not unsuitably rapid.
On another day, Desboro's feminine guests sent to town for enough green flannel to construct caricatures of hunting coats for everybody.
The remains of a stagnant pack of harriers vegetated on a neighbouring estate; Desboro managed to mount his guests on his own live-stock, including mules, farm horses, polo ponies, and a yoke of oxen; and the county saw a hunting that they were not likely to forget.
Reggie Ledyard was magnificent astride an ox, with a paper megaphone for a hunting horn, rubber boots, and his hastily basted coat split from skirt to collar. The harriers ran wherever they pleased, and the astonished farm mules wouldn't run at all. There was hysterical excitement when one cotton-tail rabbit was started behind a barn and instantly lost under it.