“I suppose she was told to make a quiet survey....”
“Like their beagles and deer-hounds, that their Landseer so loved to paint, I fear the British character is, at bottom, nothing if not rapacious!”
“It’s said, I believe, to behold the Englishman at his best, one should watch him play at tip-and-run.”
“You mean of course at cricket?”
The Queen looked doubtful: She had retained of a cricket-match at Lord’s a memory of hatless giants waving wooden sticks.
“I only wish it could have been a long engagement,” she abstrusely murmured, fastening her attention on the fountains whitely spurting in the gardens below.
Valets in cotton-jackets and light blue aprons bearing baskets of crockery and argenterie, were making ready beneath the tall Tuba trees, a supper buffet for the evening’s Ball.
“Flap your wings, little bird
O flap your wings——”
A lad’s fresh voice, sweet as a robin’s, came piping up.
“These wretched workpeople——! There’s not a peaceful corner,” the Queen complained, as her husband’s shape appeared at the door. He was followed by his first secretary—a simple commoner, yet, with the air, and manner, peculiar to the husband of a Countess.