"What's the latest quotation on heiresses?" Mr. Blagden demanded. "Was she cruel, my boy, or was she kind? Did she set the dog on you or have you thrashed by her father? I fancy both, for your present hilarity is suggestive of a gentleman in the act of attendance on his own funeral." And Peter laughed, unctuously, for his gout slumbered.
"His attempts at wit," I reflectively confided to my wine-glass, "while doubtless amiably intended, are, to his well-wishers, painful. I daresay, though, he doesn't know it. We must, then, smile indulgently upon the elephantine gambols of what he is pleased to describe as his intellect."
"Now, that," Peter pointed out, "is not what I would term a courteous method of discussing a man at his own table. You are damn disagreeable this morning, Bob. So I know, of course, that you have come another cropper in your fortune-hunting."
"Peter," said I, in admiration, "your sagacity at times is almost human! I have spent a most enjoyable day, though," I continued, idly. "I have been communing with Nature, Peter. She is about her spring-cleaning in the woods yonder, and everywhere I have seen traces of her getting things fixed for the summer. I have seen the sky, which was washed overnight, and the sun, which has evidently been freshly enamelled. I have seen the new leaves as they swayed and whispered over your extensive domains, with the fret of spring alert in every sap cell. I have seen the little birds as they hopped among said leaves and commented upon the scarcity of worms. I have seen the buxom flowers as they curtsied and danced above your flower-beds like a miniature comic-opera chorus. And besides that--"
"Yes?" said Peter, with a grin, "and besides that?"
"And besides that," said I, firmly, "I have seen nothing."
And internally I appraised this bloated Peter Blagden, and reflected that this was the man whom Stella had loved; and I appraised myself, and remembered that this had been the boy who once loved Stella. For, as I have said, it was the twenty-eighth of April, the day that Stella had died, two years ago.
