Margaret glanced at her with a smile of approval. "That sweet creature!" she thought. And said aloud, "You know perfectly well, Aura, that all the time they are gone we are thinking of them and doing something for them. Whom have we been working for to-day but the gentlemen, pray?"
To her surprise, Aurelia's brown eyes dropped, and her beautiful face turned a sudden pink.
"I never could carve a fowl," said Mrs. Lewis plaintively. "But there must be a beginning in learning anything. I wish I knew where the beginning of this duck is. Aura, will you go look in that Audubon, and see how this creature is put together? We are likely to be worse off than Mr. Secretary Pepys, when the venison pasty turned out to be 'palpable mutton.' We shall have nothing."
Margaret started up. "Infirm of purpose, give me the carver!" she cried; and seizing the knife, in a moment of inspiration, triumphantly carved the mysterious duck, and betrayed its hidden articulations.
Mrs. Lewis contemplated her with great respect. "My dear," she said, "I have done you injustice. I have believed that though you could succeed admirably in the ornamental and the extraordinary, you had no faculty for common things. I acknowledge my error.'Nemesis favors genius,' as Disraeli says of Burke."
After luncheon and a siesta, they dressed and went out onto the lawn to watch for the gentlemen, who presently appeared.
Mr. Granger presented Margaret with a spike of beautiful pink arethusa set in a ring of feathery ferns. "It came from a swamp miles away," he said. "I wanted to bring you something bright the first day."
"You always bring me something bright," she said.
To Be Continued.