"Oh, all right!" (Then, with a little accent of sudden jocosity)--"One of your foreign purchases, eh?"

We sit round the snowy table, in the pleasant light of the shaded lamps, eating chicken-salad, and abasing and rifling the great red pyramids of strawberries and raspberries, but talking not much. We young ones never _can_ talk out loud before father. He has never heard our voices raised much above a whisper. I do not think he has an idea what fine, loud, Billingsgate voices his children _really_ have. He has said grace--we always have a longer, _gratefuller_ grace than usual on Sundays--and has risen to go.

"Now for it!" cries Bobby, wildly excited, and giving me an awful dig in the ribs with his elbow.

"Shall I get it?" asks the general, in an encouraging whisper. "Cheer up, Nancy! do not look so _white_! it is all right."

He rises and fetches it, slips it quickly out of its coverings, and puts it into my hand. Father has reached the door, I run after him.

"Father!" cry I, in a choked and trembling voice. "Stop!"

He turns with the handle in his grasp, and looks at me in some surprise.

"Father!" cry I, beginning again, and holding my gift out nervously toward him, "here's--here's--here's a _bag_!"

This is my address of presentation. I hear the boys t.i.ttering at the table behind me--a sound which, telling me how ill I am speeding, makes my confusion tenfold worse. I murmur, helplessly and indistinctly, something about his never traveling, and my knowing that fact--and having been always sure that he would hate it--and then I glance helplessly round with a wild idea of flight. But at the same moment an arm of friendly strength comes round my shoulders--a friendly voice sounds in my buzzing ears.

"James," it says, simply and directly, "she has brought you a present, and she is afraid that you will not care about it."

"A _present_!" echoes my father, the meaning of the inexplicable object which has suddenly been thrust into his grasp beginning to dawn upon him. "Oh, I see! I am sure, my dear Nancy"--with a sort of embarra.s.sed stiffness that yet means to be gracious--"that I am extremely obliged to you, extremely; and though I regret that you should have wasted your money on me--yet--yet--I a.s.sure you, I shall always prize it very highly."

Then he goes out rather hastily. I return to the supper-table.

"Shake hands!" cries Algy, pouring me out a gla.s.s of claret. "_Now_, perhaps, you have some faint idea of what _I_ felt when I had to return thanks for the bridesmaids."

"Nancy!" cries Bobby, holding out the fruit to which he alludes, and speaking in a wobbly, quivering voice, with a painfully _literal_ imitation of my late address, "here's--here's--here's a _peach_!"

But I am burying my face in Sir Roger's shoulder, like a shy child.

"I _like_ you!" I say, creeping up quite close to him. "You were the only one that came to help me. If it had not been for _you_, I should be there still!"

CHAPTER XVII.

The bag-affair is quite an old one now--a fortnight old. The bag itself has, I believe, retired into the decent privacy of a cupboard, nor is it much more likely to reissue thence than was one of the frail nuns built into the wall in the old times likely to come stepping out again. Bobby has at length ceased to offer me every object which it devolves upon him to hand me, with a quavering voice and a prolonged stammer, since, though I was at first excellently vulnerable by this weapon of offense, I am now becoming _hornily_ hard and indifferent to it. We have stepped over the boundaries of June into July.

Yes, June has gone to look for all its dead brothers, wherever--since they say nothing is ever really lost--they lie with their stored sweets.

To me, this has been as merry and good a June as any one of my nineteen.

Sir Roger is beginning to talk of going home--_his_ home, that is--but rather diffidently and tentatively, as if not quite sure whether the proposal will meet with favor in my eyes. He need not be nervous on this point. I, too, am rather anxious and eager to see my house--_my_ house, if you please!--I, who have never hitherto possessed any larger residence than a doll's house, whose whole front wall opened at once, giving one an improbably simultaneous view of kitchen-range, best four-poster, and drawing-room chairs. I have, it is true, seen photographs of my new house, photographs of its east front, of its west front--photographs, in its park, of the great old cedar; in its gardens, of its woody pool--but, to tell you the truth, I want to see _it_. I have already planned a house-warming, and invited them all to it, a house-warming in which--oh, absurd!--_I_ shall sit at the head of the table, and father and mother only at the sides--_I_ shall tell the people who they are to take in to dinner, and nod my head from the top when dessert is ended.

To-day I am going to write and secure the Brat's company--that is, later in the day--but now it is quite, _quite_ early, even the letters have not come in. We have all--viz., the boys, the girls, and I--risen (in pursuance of a plan made overnight) preternaturally early, almost as early as I did on my wedding-morning, and are going out to gather mushrooms in the meadow, by the river. Indignation against the inhabitants of the neighboring town is what has torn us from our morning dreams, the greedy townsfolk, by whom, on every previous occasion, we have found our meadow rifled before we could reach it. To-day we shall, at least, meet them on equal terms. We are all rather gapy at first, more especially Algy, who has deferred the making of the greater part of his toilet till his return, looks disheveled, and sounds grumbling. But before long both gapes and grumbles depart.

Who would see the day when he is old, and stale, and shabby, when, like us, they could come out to meet him as he walks across the meadow with a mantle of dew wrapped round him, and a garland of paling rose-clouds, that an hour ago were crimson, about his head?

The place toward which we tend is at some little distance, and our road thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered fields, where the b.u.t.tercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the gra.s.s-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately flushed, as if G.o.d in pa.s.sing had called her very good, and she had reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly aloft the open cream-colored trumpets and closed red trumpet-buds of her heaven-sweet crown.

In an instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I feel, with Walter Savage Landor--

"I never pluck the rose; the violet's head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproached me: the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold."

"You will have your basket filled before we get there," I say, remonstrating, but she does not heed me.

Hot and scratched--at least I am glad that in their death-pain they were able to scratch her--she still tugs and mauls. I walk on. We reach the meadow. Well, at least _to-day_ we are in time. It has the silence and solitude of the dawn of Creation's first still day, broken only by the sheep that are cropping

"The slant gra.s.s, and daisies pale."

The slow, smooth river washes by, sucking in among the rushes. Our footsteps show plainly shaped as we step along through the h.o.a.ry dew. We separate--going one this way, one that--and, in silence and gravity, pace with bent heads and down-turned eyes through the fine, short gra.s.s.

Excitement and emulation keep us dumb, for let who will--_blase_ and used up--deny it, but there is an excitement, wholesome and hearty, in _seeking_, and a joy pure and unadulterated in finding, mushrooms in a probable field in the hopeful morning; whether the mushroom be a patriarch whose gills are browned with age, and who is big enough to be an umbrella for the fairy people, or a little milk-white b.u.t.ton, half hidden in daisies and trefoil. Sometimes a cry of rage and anguish bursts from one or other of us who has been the dupe of a puff-ball family, and who is satiating his or her revenge by stamping on the deceiver's head, and reducing its fair, round proportions to a flat and fleshy pulp. We search long and diligently, and our efforts are blessed with an unwonted success. By the time that the sun has attained height enough in the heavens to make his power tyrannically felt, our baskets are filled. Tou Tou has to throw away her wild-roses, limp and flaccid, into the dust of the lane. We walk home, singing, and making poor jokes, as is our wont. As we draw near the house with joyful foretastes of breakfast in our minds, with redly-flushed cheeks and merry eyes, I see Sir Roger leaning on the stone bal.u.s.trade of the terrace, looking as if he were watching for us, and, indeed, no sooner does he catch sight of us, than he comes toward us.

"Do you like mushrooms?" cry I, at the top of my voice, long before I have reached him, holding up my basket triumphantly. "See, I have got the most of anybody, except Tou Tou!"

I have met him by the end of this sentence.

"Do you like mushrooms?" I repeat, lifting the lid, and giving him a peep into the creamy and pink-colored treasures inside, "oh, you _must_!

if you do not, I shall have a _divorce_! I could not bear a difference of opinion upon such a subject."

I have never given him time to speak, and now I look with appealing laughter into his silent face.

"Why, what is the matter?" I cry, with an abrupt change of tone. "What has happened? How odd you look!"

"Nothing has happened," he answers, trying to smile, but I see that it is quite against the grain, "only that I have had some not very pleasant news."

"It is not any thing about--about the _Brat_!" cry I, stopping suddenly, seizing his arm with both hands, and turning, as I feel, extremely pale, while my thoughts fly to the only one of my beloveds that is out of my sight.

"About the _Brat_!" he echoes in surprise, "oh, dear no! nothing!"

"Then I do not much care _who_ is dead?" I answer, unfeelingly, drawing a long breath; "he is the only person _out_ of this house whose death would afflict me much, and I do not think that there is any one besides _us_ that _you_ are very devoted to, is there?"

"Why are you so determined that some one is _dead_?" he asks, smiling again, but this time a little more naturally; "is there nothing vexatious in the world but _death_?"

"Yes," say I, laughing, despite myself, as my thoughts revert to my late employment, "there are _puff-b.a.l.l.s_!"--then, ashamed of having been flippant, and afraid of having been unsympathetic, I add hastily: "I wish you would tell me what it is! I am sure, _when I hear_, I shall be vexed too; but you see as long as I do not know what it is, I cannot, can I?"

"There is no time now," he says, glancing toward father, whose head appears through the dining-room windows. "See! they are going to breakfast!--afterward I will tell you--afterward--and child--" (putting his hands on my shoulders, and essaying to look at me with an altogether cheered and careless face,) "do not you worry your head about it!--eat your breakfast with an easy mind; after all, it is nothing very bad!--it could not be any thing _very_ bad, as long as--." He stops abruptly, and adds hastily, "let us have a look at your mushrooms! well, you _have_ a quant.i.ty!"

"Yes, have not I?" say I, triumphantly, "more than any of them, except Tou Tou--." Then, not quite satisfied with the impression our late talk has left upon me: "General!" say I, lowering my face and reddening, "I hope you do not think that I am _quite_ a baby because I like childish things--gathering mushrooms--running about with the boys--talking to Jacky. I can understand serious things _too_, I a.s.sure you. I think I could enter into your trouble--I think, if you gave me the chance, that you would find that I could!"

Then a sort of idiotic false shame overtakes me, and without waiting for his answer I disappear.

CHAPTER XVIII.

I meet Bobby retiring to the kitchen to cook his mushrooms himself. He invites me to join him, but I refuse. It is the first time in the annals of history that I was ever known to say no to such an offer. Bobby regards me with reproachful anger, and makes a m.u.f.fled remark, the drift of which I understand to be that, though I may _pretend_ not to be, I _am_ grown fine, as he always said I should. To-day it seems to me as if breakfast would _never_ end. It is one of our fixed laws that no one shall leave the table until father gives the signal by saying grace.