It was an evening of cloudless radiance; sweet and mellow as is frequent at the close of summer.
“Oh, ki, honey! It so cleah, I can see de lil iluns ob yalleh sand, far away b’yond de Point.”
“Dearest!” he inattentively murmured, recognizing on the Avenue the elegant cobweb wheels of his mother’s Bolivian buggy.
Accompanied by Eurydice Edwards, she was driving her favourite mules.
“An’ de shipwreck off de coral reef, oh, ki!”
“Let me find you the long-glass, dear,” he said, glad for an instant to step inside.
Leaning with one foot thrust nimbly out through the balcony-rails towards the street, she gazed absorbed.
Delegates of agricultural guilds bearing banners, making for the Cathedral square (the pilgrims’ starting-point), were advancing along the avenue amidst applause: fruit-growers, rubber-growers, sugar-growers, opium-growers all doubtless wishful of placating Nature that redoubtable Goddess, by showing a little honour to the Church. “Oh Lord, not as Sodom,” she murmured, deciphering a text attached to the windscreen of a luxurious automobile.
“Divine one, here they are.”