Her face broke into a charming smile. 'You have the dearest eyes,' she
said, putting up her finger and gently tracing his eyebrows with it.
Wemyss's eyes, full at that moment of love and pride, were certainly
dear eyes, but a noise at the other end of the room made Lucy jump so in
his arms, gave her apparently such a fright, that when he turned his
head to see who it was daring to interrupt them, daring to startle his
little girl like that, and beheld the parlourmaid, his eyes weren't dear
at all but very angry.
The parlourmaid had come in with the coffee; and seeing the two
interlaced figures against the light of the big window had pulled up
short, uncertain what to do. This pulling up had jerked a spoon off its
saucer onto the floor with a loud rattle because of the floor not having
a carpet on it and being of polished oak, and it was this noise that
made Lucy jump so excessively that her jump actually made Wemyss jump
too.
In the parlourmaid's untrained phraseology there had been a good deal of
billing and cooing during luncheon, and even in the hall before luncheon
there were examples of it, but what she found going on in the library
was enough to make anybody stop dead and upset things,--it was such, she
said afterwards in the kitchen, that if she didn't know for a fact that
they were really married she wouldn't have believed it. Married people
in the parlourmaid's experience didn't behave like that. What affection
there was was exhibited before, and not after, marriage. And she went on
to describe the way in which Wemyss--thus briefly and irreverently did
they talk of their master in the kitchen--had flown at her for having
come into the library. 'After telling me to,' she said. 'After saying,
"We'll 'ave coffee in the library."' And they all agreed, as they had
often before agreed, that if it weren't that he was in London half the
time they wouldn't stay in the place five minutes.
Meanwhile Wemyss and Lucy were sitting side by side in two enormous
chairs facing the unlit library fire drinking their coffee. The fire was
only lit in the evenings, explained Wemyss, after the 1st of April; the
weather ought to be warm enough by then to do without fires in the
daytime, and if it wasn't it was its own look-out.
'Why did you jump so?' he asked. 'You gave me such a start. I couldn't
think what was the matter.'
'I don't know,' said Lucy, faintly flushing. 'Perhaps'--she smiled at
him over the arm of the enormous chair in which she almost totally
disappeared--'because the maid caught us.'
'Caught us?'
'Being so particularly affectionate.'
'I like that,' said Wemyss. 'Fancy feeling guilty because you're being
affectionate to your own husband.'
'Oh, well,' laughed Lucy, 'don't forget I haven't had him long.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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