Linda, from the balcony, beheld them arrive in state, and waved her handkerchief in token of welcome and approval. “Oh! Laura, I was beginning to think you were never coming. What kept you so late? You will hardly have time to dress for dinner, and I do so want you to look well.”
“Why should you want me to look well? I fancied I was looking rather nice—that is, for a country cousin, as Josie says.”
“What!” almost shouted Linda; “hasn’t father told you? I see he hasn’t—isn’t it just like him? If the Duke of Edinburgh and Lord Wolseley were coming to dinner he’d forget all about it. And yet he thinks he’s a good father.”
“So he is,” said Laura, “and I won’t have him run down. What is the dreadful secret? Has the aide-de-camp come to ask us to dinner at Government House?”
“No! But without joking, Laura, it is a matter of importance. That is—we should have thought so at Windāhgil. Mr. Barrington Hope is coming to dine.”
“Is he?” said Laura, coolly. Linda afterwards said it was “unnatural calmness.” “Then suppose you ask the maid to turn on the gas directly. We must put on our best bibs and tuckers, as Mrs. Grandison says.”
Mr. Barrington Hope arrived in due time, accurately apparelled and looking—as most men do—to great advantage in evening costume. Though much above the ordinary height, his breadth of shoulder and justness of proportion prevented any appearance of incongruity. Evidently one of those persons who wisely dismiss the problems of the day with their ordinary garb, his features wore an entirely different expression, so closely allied to careless ease that Mr. Stamford could hardly believe he saw before him the anxious brain-worker of the morning.
As the two men stood together on the balcony overlooking the bay with its evening crowd of water-wayfarers and pleasure seekers, the elder said—
“How wonderful an image of rest and peace a calm sea presents, especially at this hour! There are hard work and deep thoughts frequently upon blue water, but I confess I can never connect them together.”
“My own feeling, quite,” said Hope. “I am passionately fond of the sea, but few people have less time for indulging such a taste. I always feel it to be the true home of the lotus-eater. ‘In calm or storm, by rock or bay,’ there is rest for the soul when on the deep. If I were safely embarked for Europe and clear of the Heads, I should almost expire of joy, I really believe.”