The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the ColonelAldrich, Thomas Bailey
General
The Queen of Sheba, and My Cousin the Colonel
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey
Fiction
moments when he could not look at Miss Denham without half expecting to
see the man Blaisdell flitting somewhere in the background. Then there
were days when it was impossible for Lynde to picture her as anything
different from what she now was. But whatever conclusion he came to, a
doubt directly insinuated itself.
While he was drifting from one uncertainty to another, a fortnight
elapsed in which his intimacy with the Denhams had daily increased.
They were in Geneva for an indefinite time, awaiting directions from
Mr. Denham. The few sights in the city had been exhausted; the places
of interest in the environs could not be visited by ladies without
escort; so it fell out that Lynde accompanied the Denhams on several
short excursions--to Petit and Grand Sacconnex, to the Villa Tronchin,
to Pregny and Mornex. These were days which Lynde marked with a red
letter. At the end of the month, however, he was in the same state of
distressing indecision relative to Miss Denham. On one point he
required no light--he was deeply interested in her, so deeply, indeed,
that it had become a question affecting all his future, whether or not
she was the person he had encountered on his horseback journey three
years before. If she was--
But Edward Lynde had put the question out of his thought that night as
he walked home from the cafe. His two bars of opera music lasted him to
the hotel steps. Though it was late--a great bell somewhere, striking
two, sent its rich reverberation across the lake while he was unlocking
his chamber door--Lynde seated himself at a table and wrote his note to
the Denhams.
Flemming had promised to come and take coffee with him early the next
morning, that is to say at nine o'clock. Before Flemming arrived,
Lynde's invitation had been despatched and accepted. He was re-reading
Miss Denham's few lines of acceptance when he heard his friend, at the
other end of the hall, approaching with great strides.
"The thousandth part of a minute late!" cried Flemming, throwing open
the door. "There's no excuse for me. When a man lives in a city where
they manufacture a hundred thousand watches a year--that's one watch
and a quarter every five minutes day and night--it's a moral duty to be
punctual. Ned, you look like a prize pink this morning."
"I have had such a sleep! Besides, I've just gone through the
excitement of laying out the menu for our dinner. Good heavens, I
forgot the flowers! We'll go and get them after breakfast. There's your
coffee. Cream, old man? I am in a tremor over this dinner, you know. It
is a maiden effort. By the way, Flemming, I wish you'd forget what I
said about Miss Denham, last evening. I was all wrong."
"I told you so; what has happened?"
"Nothing. Only I have reconsidered the matter, and I see I was wrong to
let it upset me."
"I saw that from the first."
"Some persons," said Lynde gayly, "always see everything from the
first. You belong to the I-told-you-so family, only you belong to the
cheerful branch."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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