“I will come down at Christmas, if I may,” I said, tenderly and humbly; but she never replied, and the next moment was marshalling the girls for walking home.
They walked to the gate in the Bayswater Road in a group, and formed up two and two as they got outside.
Lucy never turned her head once, but nearly every young lady treated herself to a look behind; when they might have seen me plunged down in melancholy on the seat, digging a morose pattern into the Broad Walk with the point of my stick.
I drawled back unhappily across the Gardens and down the empty Row to Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly, and to the club.
Christmas! and this was only October!
Sympathetic readers (and I desire no others) can have no conception what I suffered during the next few days.
CHAPTER VI
EARLY DIFFICULTIES—I FAIL TO PERSUADE THE HONORABLE EDGAR FANSHAWE, THE REVEREND PERCY BLYTH, AND MR. PARKER WHITE, M. P., TO JOIN OUR MONTE CARLO PARTY
Lucy declares I have written enough about her, and now had better get on to the Monte Carlo part—who went with me, and why they went, and so on.
I dare say she’s right; for though we neither of us know anything whatever about writing, she says she represents the average reader, and, having been told (as well as I could do it) something about “The French Horn” and my love-affair there, is, as an average reader, growing anxious to learn how I got the party together for so apparently hazardous, not to say hopeless, an enterprise.