to one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness!
I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every
surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure
such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure
myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.
The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind
me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had
happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there;
and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary
person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both
in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their
faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me
I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not
until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where
I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs.
Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner
I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to
greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she
could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a
stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such
free deportment evidently went with her tall companion's method of
speech: hadn't the little lady informed me during our first brief
meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's
tongue "too downright"?
The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them
while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs.
Weguelin by saying to me, "I haven't a penny for your thoughts, but I'll
exchange."
"Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?"
"Oh, I'll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out
of that house, was a back of thought."
"Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?"
It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: "Ladies first, you
know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port."
"Would we did everywhere!" I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware
that beneath the little lady's gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a
setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in
the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs.
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