"Oh, how cruel!" said Carroll, "withering up my delicate feelings with thoughtless sarcasm! Smell? no! My what-d'ye-call-it—sympathy—will tell me which it is. My heart will beat faster as I approach it. But I'll have that leaf all the same, please."
"And it might be as well to know where to look for it."
"We found it in the ruins—in the wall of the refectory," said Hardwicke.
Sissy looked doubtful, but Carroll exclaimed, "Oh, I know! That's where the old fellows used to dine, isn't it? And had sermons read to them all the time."
"What a bore!" some one suggested.
"Well, I don't know about that," said Archie. "Sermons always are awful bores, ain't they? But I don't think I should mind 'em so much if I might eat my dinner all the time." He stopped with a comical look of alarm. "I say, we haven't got any parsons here, have we?"
"No," said Fothergill smiling. "We've brought the surgeon, in case of broken bones, but we've left the chaplain at home. So you may give us the full benefit of your opinions."
"I thought there wasn't one," Archie remarked, looking up at Sissy, "because nobody said grace. Or don't you ever say grace at a picnic?"
"I don't think you do," Sissy replied. "Unless it were a very Low Church picnic perhaps. I don't know, I'm sure."
"Makes a difference being out of doors, I suppose," said Archie, examining the little frond which Edith had given him. "And this is what you call maiden-hair?"