This pair were not at all sentimental. Indeed, their talk was quite technical: all about rings and edges, and heel and toe,—what skates are best, and who best use them. There is an immense amount of sympathy to be exchanged on such topics, and it was somewhat significant that they avoided other themes where they might not sympathize so thoroughly. The negative part of a conversation is often as important as its positive.
So the four entertained themselves finely, sometimes as a quartette, sometimes as two duos with proper changes of partners, until the clear west began to grow golden and the clear east pink with sunset.
"It is a pity to go," said Peter Skerrett. "Everything here is perfection and Fine Art; but we must not be unfaithful to dinner. Dinner would have a right to punish us, if we did not encourage its efforts to be Fine Art also."
"Now, Mr. Wade," Fanny commanded, "your most heroic series of exploits, to close this heroic day."
He nimbly dashed through his list. The ice was traced with a labyrinth of involuted convolutions.
Wade's last turn brought him to the very spot of his tumble.
"Ah!" said he. "Here is the oar that tripped me, with 'Wade, his mark,' gashed into it. If I had not this"—he touched Miss Damer's handkerchief—"for a souvenir, I think I would dig up the oar and carry it home."
"Let it melt out and float away in the spring," Mary said. "It may be a perch for a sea-gull or a buoy for a drowning man."
Here, if this were a long story instead of a short one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett's house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett's dinner. Peter and his wife had both been to great pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to avoid. How not to be bored is the object of all civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the methods. I must dismiss the dinner and the evening, stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.
"You will join us again to-morrow on the river," said Mrs. Skerrett, as
Wade rose to go.