Chapter 16 - Page 2

way of carrying
on his own independent train of thought; and he
sat listening to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing
and riding, varied by an occasional dance at the
primitive inn when a man-of-war came in. A few pleasant
people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were
picknicking at the inn, and the Selfridge Merrys had
come down for three weeks because Kate Merry had
had bronchitis. They were planning to lay out a lawn
tennis court on the sands; but no one but Kate and
May had racquets, and most of the people had not
even heard of the game.

All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time
to do more than look at the little vellum book that
Archer had sent her the week before (the "Sonnets
from the Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart
"How they brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix," because it was one of the first things he had ever
read to her; and it amused her to be able to tell him
that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called
Robert Browning.

Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would
be late for breakfast; and they hurried back to the
tumble-down house with its pointless porch and unpruned
hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where
the Wellands were installed for the winter. Mr.
Welland's sensitive domesticity shrank from the discomforts
of the slovenly southern hotel, and at immense
expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties,
Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise
an establishment partly made up of discontented
New York servants and partly drawn from the local
African supply.

"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in
his own home; otherwise he would be so wretched that
the climate would not do him any good," she
explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising
Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming
across a breakfast table miraculously supplied with the
most varied delicacies, was presently saying to Archer:
"You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we literally camp.
I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how
to rough it."

Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised
as their daughter by the young man's sudden arrival;
but it had occurred to him to explain that he had felt
himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed to
Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning
any duty.

"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring,"
he said, heaping his plate with straw-coloured griddle-
cakes and drowning them in golden syrup. "If I'd only
been as prudent at your age May would have been
dancing at the Assemblies now, instead of spending her
winters in a wilderness with an old