We did not even know that.
"Oh," I said, "Mediterranean, I suppose."
To us the Mediterranean is a far-off beautiful dream. We sat trying to visualize for ourselves the incredible fate of visiting the Mediterranean as we might take the cars for Broadway. I heard Bill sigh softly. Mac's voice, when he spoke, was gruff.
"I'd ask the kids if I were you," he said.
"I can do that," I agreed dreamily.
Sometimes, it must be admitted, we get homesick. It generally happens when we have letters from home. We felt rather keenly then, the shrewd poignancy of Mr. Carville's description of himself as an alien. But to us it implied a subdued if passionate desire to see again the quiet landscape of England. The painter-cousin's sketch of the aeroplane near a rick, sunk in the ditch by a hedge, in the clear transparent afternoon light of late October, appealed to us. To see a quickset hedge again ... we sighed.
No doubt we would have allowed the daily flow and return of life's business to oust our neighbours' fortunes from our minds, and waited patiently for Mr. Carville's reappearance, had not a most exciting game of cow-boys, a game in which I for the nonce was a fleeing Indian brave, led to an abrupt encounter with Mrs. Carville. Benvenuto Cellini's scalp already hung at my girdle, visible as a pocket-handkerchief; and he lay far down near the cabbages, to the imaginative eye a writhing and disgusting spectacle. The intrepid Giuseppe Mazzini, however, had thrown his lariat about me with no mean adroitness, and I was down and captured. This thrilling dénouement was enacted near the repaired fence, and any horror I may have simulated was suddenly made real by the appearance of Mrs. Carville, who had been feeding her fowls. When one is prone on the grass, a clothes-line drawn tight about one's arms, and a triumphant cow-boy of eight years in the very act of placing his foot on one's neck, it is difficult to look dignified. The sudden intrusion of an unsympathetic personality will banish the romantic illusion.
It may be that the sombre look in Mrs. Carville's face was merely expressive of a doubt of my sanity. For a grown man to be playing with two little boys at three o'clock of a Tuesday afternoon, may have seemed bizarre enough in her view. To me, however, endeavouring to disengage myself from my conqueror and assume an attitude in keeping with my age and reputation, her features were ominously shadowed by displeasure.
"If I disturbed you," I said courteously, "I am sorry."
She put her hand on the paling and the basket slid down her arm. She seemed to be pondering whether I had disturbed her or no, eyeing me reflectively. Ben came up, no longer a scalped and abandoned cow-boy, but a delighted child. Perhaps the trust and frank camaraderie of the little fellow's attitude towards me affected her, for her face softened.