“My dear,” said he, and then he stopped short. All the carefully prepared exordiums went out of his head. How now to break the news to her he did not know.
“Are you very tired?” she asked.
“Not a bit,” said John.
“Then be a dear, and read me something. Read me 'Elaine.' ”
The elevated and sophisticated and very highly educated may learn with surprise that “The Idylls of the King” still appeal to ingenuous fifteen. Thank God there are yet remaining also some sentimentalists of fifty who can read them with pleasure and profit!
“But that is so sad, Stellamaris,” said John. “You don't want to be sad this beautiful spring morning.”
Which was a very inconsistent remark to make, seeing that he was about to dash the young sun from her sky altogether.
“I like being sad sometimes, especially when the world is bright. And Lancelot was such a dear,”—here spoke ingenuous fifteen,—“and Elaine—oh, do read it!”
So John, secretly glad of a respite, drew from the bookcase which held her scrupulously selected and daintily bound library the volume of Tennyson and read aloud the idyll of Lancelot and Elaine. And the sea-wind blew about his head and fluttered the brown hair on the pillow, and the log-fire blazed in the chimney, and the great dog slept, and a noontide hush was over all things. And Risca read the simple poem with the heart of the girl of fifteen, and forgot everything else in the world.
When he had finished, the foolish eyes of both were moist. “The dead oar'd by the dumb,” with the lily in her hand,—dead for the love of Lancelot,—affected them both profoundly.