"Never mind Henry," said that gentleman's representative. "He has got a new letter from a man in London whom he keeps for the purpose of making him miserable with catalogues of sales of books and papers he can't afford to buy. But he potters over them, and marks the lists, and writes back to the man in London, and, as you know, we do manage to become possessed of much more dear antiquity than the house will hold or our income warrant. This time, he is buried alive for an hour to come, for it is about a sale of Sir Philip Francis's letters and manuscripts at Sotheby's very soon." "I don't believe the real 'Junius' announcing himself would get me out of this bamboo chair and away from this deepening of eventide upon the sea and islands, the afterglow of sunset melting into moonlight, the soft caressing of the salt air blending with those hidden heliotropes of yours! Now, dear lady, let's go back to the concrete. I knew, the moment your eagle eye fell on me this afternoon, you would find out all that in me is. For so many years I've been telling you my scrapes, I may as well out with the latest and biggest of them. Two months ago, I took Gladys Eliot in to dinner at the Sargents'. I kept it from you in town, for which you'll say I am properly punished. I fell in love with her, like a schoolboy with green apples, heeding not the danger of unwholesomeness. After that, I met her when and wherever I could push my way to her. I thought of her, sleeping and waking; received from her looks and tones and words that would, as the lady novelists are so fond of saying, 'tempt an anchorite;' _believed_ in her!" "My poor child, how wretched!" said Mrs. Gervase, promptly. "So it proved. Last but not least of the comedy,--I skip the details,--I was deluded into buttoning myself up in a fluffy, long-tailed, iron-gray coat that I got in London last spring and had not had time to wear, put on a bunch of white carnations, and drove out to one of those inane Claremont teas in my friend Pierre Sargent's trap, because, forsooth, _she_ asked me. For an hour I suffered martyrdom in that little greenhouse sort of a veranda, with people herded together gossiping, and not setting their feet upon the lawn over the river that they came out to see. Women talked drivel to me, waiters slopped tea over me, and we walked on slices of buttered bread. Then _she_ came--on the box-seat of that brute McLaughlin's drag, having eyes for him only, so that every one talked of it!"