and she is probably about to add some such statement as, “It behooves one to look out,” when suddenly the husband appears on the scene. With a woman’s ready wit, she breaks off the sentence abruptly, saying:
Gismond here?
And have you brought my tercel back?
I was just telling Adela
How many birds it struck since May.
We might put into words what passes through her mind. She is about to add something further concerning the eyes of her boy, when she hears the sound of feet along the walk. Expecting her husband, the concluding words of her sentence pass from her mind as she turns to see the visitor. It is Gismond. He must not know that she has been speaking of him. The tercel in his hand gives her the opportunity of opening the conversation, which she is quick to do, adroitly pretending that it was of that very tercel she and her friend had been conversing before his arrival.
One more illustration of this kind will suffice. A tender, loving woman is talking to her husband. He is a learned poet, and perhaps just a trifle of a pedant. He is most minute and exact in all he does, ever losing sight of the spirit in the letter. The wife is the true poet, caring nothing for the archæology and philology and the geography, but quick to perceive the inner meaning of the poetic. He has told her a story in the past, and she is going now to tell it back to him with a new moral.
Here is the first stanza:
What a pretty tale you told me
Once upon a time