Maryllia's glance swept over him carelessly.
"Much obliged to her, I'm sure!" she said--"I can quite imagine the anxiety she felt concerning me! So good of her! Is she a great friend of yours?"
Mr. Longford looked slightly disconcerted.
"Well, no," he replied--"I have only during these last few days-- through Sir Morton--had the pleasure of her acquaintance--"
"Mr. Longford is not a 'society' man!" said Sir Morton, with a chuckle--"He lives on the heights of Parnassus--and looks down with scorn on the browsing sheep in the valleys below! He is a great author!"
"Indeed!" and Maryllia raised her delicately arched eyebrows with a faint movement of polite surprise--"But all authors are great nowadays, aren't they? There are no little ones left."
"Oh, yes, indeed, and alas, there are!" exclaimed Julian Adderley, flourishing his emptied tea-cup in the air before setting it back in its saucer and depositing the whole on a table before him; "I am one of them, Miss Vancourt! Pray be merciful to me!"
The absurd attitude of appeal he assumed moved Maryllia to a laugh.
"Well, when you look like that I guess I will!" she said playfully, not without a sense of liking for the quaint human creature who so willingly made himself ridiculous without being conscious of it-- "What is your line in the small way?"
"Verse!" he replied, with tragic emphasis--"Verse which nobody reads--verse which nobody wants--verse which whenever it struggles into publication, my erudite friend here, Mr. Longford, batters into pulp with a sledge-hammer review of half-a-dozen lines in the heavier magazines. Verse, my dear Miss Vancourt!--verse written to please myself, though its results do not feed myself. But what matter! I am happy! This village of St. Rest, for example, has exercised a spell of enchantment over me. It has soothed my soul! So much so, that I have taken a cottage in a wood--how melodious that sounds!--at the modest rent of a pound a week. That much I can afford,--that much I will risk--and on the air, the water, the nuts, the berries, the fruits, the flowers, I will live like a primaeval man, and let the baser world go by!" He ran his fingers through his long hair. "It will be an experience! So new--so fresh!"
Miss Tabitha sniffed sarcastically, and gave a short, hard laugh.
"I hope you'll enjoy yourself!" she said tartly--"But you'll soon tire. I told you at once when you said you had decided to spend the summer in this neighbourhood that you'd regret it. You'll find it very dull."