a,
after despatching his toast and coffee to the Major in his own room.
He sometimes came down to breakfast, but such a dissipation as yesterday
put it out of the question on this particular morning.

The lark continued an unalloyed, unqualified lark quite to the end of
the second cup of tea, when it seemed to undergo a slight clouding
over--a something we should rather indicate by saying that it slowed
down passing through a station, than that it was modulated into a minor
key. Of course, we are handicapped in our metaphors by an imperfect
understanding of the exact force of the word "lark" used in this
connexion.

The day before does not come back to us during our first cup at
breakfast, whether it be tea or coffee. A happy disposition lets what
we have slept on sleep, till at least it has glanced at the weather,
and knows that it is going to be cooler, some rain. Then memory
revives, and all the chill inheritance of overnight. We pick up the
thread of our existence, and draw our finger over the last knots, and
then go on where we left off. We remember that we have to see about
this, and we mustn't be late at that, and that there's an order got
to be made out for the stores. There wasn't in Sally's case, certainly,
because it was Sunday; but there was tribulation awaiting her as soon
as she could recollect her overdue analysis of the Major's concealed
facts. She had put it off till leisure should come; and now that she
was only looking at a microcosm of the garden seen through the window,
and reflected upside down in the tea-urn, she had surely met with
leisure. Her mind went back tentatively on the points of the old man's
reminiscences, as she looked at her own thoughtful face in the convex
of the urn opposite, nursed in two miniature hands whose elbows were
already becoming unreasonably magnified, though really they were next
to nothing nearer.

Just to think! The Major had actually been in love when he was young.
More than once he must have been, because Sally knew he was a widower.
She touched the shiny urn with her finger, to see how hideously it
swelled in the mirror. You know what fun that is! But she took her
finger back, because it was too hot, though off the boil.

There was a bluebottle between the blind and the window-pane, as usual;
if he was the same bluebottle that was there when Fenwick was first
brought into this room, he had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,
like the old _regime_ in France.