“Don’t speak to me, Basil! I never heard of anything so atrocious. Go on your knees to them if they refuse! They can sit here with me, and you and he can stand. Fly!”
I knew she was punishing me for her own reluctance; but I flew, in that sense of the term, and easily overhauled them in the tangle of people coming and going in the path, and the nursemaids pushing their perambulators in either direction. Hat in hand I delivered my message. I could see that it gave the women great pleasure and the man some doubt. His mouth fell open a little; their cheeks flushed and their eyes shone.
“I don’t know as we better,” the wife hesitated; “I’m afraid we’ll crowd you.” And she looked wistfully toward my wife. The young girl looked at her.
“Not at all!” I cried. “There’s an abundance of room. My wife’s keeping the places for you,”—in fact, I saw her putting her arm out along the bench, and explaining to a couple who had halted in front of her that the seats were taken—“and she’ll be disappointed.”
“Well,” the woman consented, with a little sigh of triumph that touched me, and reanimated all my interest in her and in her friend. She said, with a sort of shy, instinctive politeness, “I don’t know as you and Mr. Deering got acquainted last night.”
“My name is March,” I said, and I shook the hand of Mr. Deering. It was rather thick.
“And this—is our friend,” Mrs. Peering went on, in presentation of me to the young lady, “Miss Gage, that’s come with us.”
I was delighted that I had guessed their relative qualities so perfectly, and when we arrived at Mrs. March I glibly presented them. My wife was all that I could have wished her to be of sympathetic and intelligent. She did not overdo it by shaking hands, but she made places for the ladies, smiling cordially; and Mrs. Deering made Miss Gage take the seat between them. Her husband and I stood awhile in front of them, and then I said we would go off and find chairs somewhere.
We did not find any till we had climbed to the upland at the south-east of the park, and then only two iron ones, which it was useless to think of transporting. But there was no reason why we should not sit in them where they were: we could keep the ladies in plain sight, and I could not mistake “Washington Post” when the band came to it. Mr. Deering sank into one of the chairs with a sigh of satisfaction which seemed to complete itself when he discovered in the thick grass at his feet a twig from one of the tall, slim pines above us. He bent over for it, and then, as he took out his penknife and clicked open a blade to begin whittling, he cast up a critical glance at the trees.
“Pretty nice pines,” he said; and he put his hand on the one next to us with a sort of appreciation that interested me.