"Je concois, je concois: on sait ce que c'est qu'un ami. Bonjour,
Mademoiselle!"
"But, Monsieur, here is your handkerchief."
"Keep it, keep it, till the letter is read, then bring it me; I shall
read the billet's tenor in your eyes."
When he was gone, the pupils having already poured out of the
schoolroom into the berceau, and thence into the garden and court to
take their customary recreation before the five-o'clock dinner, I
stood a moment thinking, and absently twisting the handkerchief round
my arm. For some reason--gladdened, I think, by a sudden return of the
golden glimmer of childhood, roused by an unwonted renewal of its
buoyancy, made merry by the liberty of the closing hour, and, above
all, solaced at heart by the joyous consciousness of that treasure in
the case, box, drawer up-stairs,--I fell to playing with the
handkerchief as if it were a ball, casting it into the air and
catching it--as it fell. The game was stopped by another hand than
mine-a hand emerging from a paletot-sleeve and stretched over my
shoulder; it caught the extemporised plaything and bore it away with
these sullen words:
|