"I know how many lumps you take in your tea, and I know that you prefer cream, but shall I pass you the raspberry jam?"
"No, thank you," he replied promptly. "My mother always used to dose me up with calomel disguised in raspberry jam, and I can't eat it now without tasting the medicine."
"Very well," Edith laughed, "try some honey. But please tell me what has put your friend Monty in the dumps. At Bermuda he was stimulating, but down here he's as cheerful as a crutch."
"Monty in the dumps?" Cosden echoed, surprised. "Why, I hadn't noticed it. Just before Hamlen came to visit him, he was way down,—bemoaned his age, and all that sort of thing. I thought we'd got him out of that. I must look him over and see what the trouble is.—Here come our hostess and Hamlen. Did you ever see such a change in any one?"
Marian approached with her brightest smile. "I'm glad Edith is keeping you from being bored," she said. "I'm afraid I've been very remiss."
"I don't see how you could divide yourself into much smaller bits, Mrs. Thatcher," Cosden replied. "This is a big family you have at present."
"The bigger the better," she exclaimed brightly. "I hoped I should find you out here, and as I see the tea is still hot perhaps Edith will let us join you. Philip and I have been walking and talking until we are really tired."
"I am entranced with all this," Hamlen said, turning to Edith. "I had no idea, when I paraded my few acres at Bermuda, that I was competing with an estate like Sagamore. I wonder some one didn't rebuke me for my presumption!"
"Isn't that a pretty compliment!" Marian cried. "You have put yourself into every inch of your beautiful place, Philip; Harry and I have only done that to a very small extent. It is beautiful, I admit, and I love it just as I love the beauties with which you have surrounded yourself at home."
"It makes little difference, after all, where one finds it, so long as it is beauty," Hamlen replied. "'The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.' I used to think Emerson must have written that in Bermuda, but it might have been written here."