Aprils Lady | Page 8

welcome!" cries she, dodging behind him as Tommy, fully armed, and all alive, comes tearing round the corner. "Ah, ha, Tommy, sold! I've got a champion now. I'm no longer shivering in my shoes. Mr. Dysart will protect me--won't you, Mr. Dysart?" to the young man, who says "yes" without stirring a muscle. The heaviest bribe would not have induced him to move, because, standing behind him, she has laid her dainty fingers on his shoulders, from which safe position she mocks at Tommy with security. Were the owners of the shoulders to stir, the owners of the fingers might remove the delightful members. Need it be said that, with this awful possibility before him, Mr. Dysart is prepared to die at his post rather than budge an inch.
And, indeed, death seems imminent. Tommy charging round the rhododendron, finding himself robbed of his expected scalp, grows frantic, and makes desperate passes at Mr. Dysart's legs, which that hero, being determined, as I have said, not to stir under any provocation, circumvents with a considerable display of policy, such as:
"I say, Tommy, old boy, is that you? How d'ye do? Glad to see me, aren't you?" This last very artfully with a view to softening the attacks. "You don't know what I've brought you!" This is more artful still, and distinctly a swindle, as he has brought him nothing, but on the spot he determines to redeem himself with the help of the small toy-shops and sweety shops down in the village. "Put down that fork like a good boy, and let me tell you how----"
"Oh, bother you!" says Tommy, indignantly. "I'd have had her only for you! What brought you here now? Couldn't you have waited a bit?"
"Yes! what brought you?" says Miss Kavanagh, most disgracefully going over to the other side, now that danger is at an end, and Tommy has planted his impromptu tomahawk in a bed close by.
"Do you want to know?" says he quickly.
The fingers have been removed from his shoulders, and he is now at liberty to turn round and look at the charming face beside him.
"No, no!" says she, shaking her head. "I've been rude, I suppose. But it is such a wonderful thing to see you here so soon again."
"Why should I not be here?"
"Of course! That is the one unanswerable question. But you must confess it is puzzling to those who thought of you as being elsewhere."
"If you are one of 'those' you fill me with gratitude. That you should think of me even for a moment----"
"Well, I haven't been thinking much," says she, frankly, and with the most delightful if scarcely satisfactory little smile: "I don't believe I was thinking of you at all, until I turned the corner just now, and then, I confess, I was startled, because I believed you at the Antipodes."
"Perhaps your belief was mother to your thought."
"Oh, no. Don't make me out so nasty. Well, but were you there?"
"Perhaps so. Where are they?" asks he gloomily. "One hears a good deal about them, but they comprise so many places that now-a-days one is hardly sure where they exactly lie. At all events no one has made them clear to me."
"Does it rest with me to enlighten you?" asks she, with a little aggravating half glance from under her long lashes; "well--the North Pole, Kamtschatka, Smyrna, Timbuctoo, Maoriland, Margate----"
"We'll stop there, I think," says he, with a faint grimace.
"There! At Margate? No, thanks. You can, if you like, but as for me----"
"I don't suppose you would stop anywhere with me," says he. "I have occasional glimmerings that I hope mean common sense. No, I have not been so adventurous as to wander towards Margate. I have only been to town and back again."
"What town?"
"Eh? What town?" says he astonished. "London, you know."
"No, I don't know," says Miss Kavanagh, a little petulantly. "One would think there was only one town in the world, and that all you English people had the monopoly of it. There are other towns, I suppose. Even we poor Irish insignificants have a town or two. Dublin comes under that head, I suppose?"
"Undoubtedly. Of course," making great haste to abase himself. "It is mere snobbery our making so much of London. A kind of despicable cant, you know."
"Well, after all, I expect it is a big place in every way," says Miss Kavanagh, so far mollified by his submission as to be able to allow him something.
"It's a desert," says Tommy, turning to his aunt, with all the air of one who is about to impart to her useful information. "It's raging with wild beasts. They roam to and fro and are at their wits' ends----" here Tommy, who is great on Bible history, but who occasionally gets mixed, stops short. "Father says they're