Page:Far from the Maddening Girls.djvu/170

 murmur of bees is to a lazy, hazy, summer afternoon. The physicians will tell you that human vitality is at its lowest in the small hours of the morning, but it has been my experience that the principle of celibacy reaches its ebb about five in the afternoon.

The sensation was no novelty to me, and I was on my guard against it as Miss Berrith touched a match to the wick of the alcohol lamp. I had taken the most uncomfortable chair in the room, and was resolved to limit myself to one cup of tea. I was finishing my second when the conversation shifted suddenly from the forest fires in the North and the floods in the West to the subject of Darius Doane.

“Don’t you find him improved?” inquired Miss Berrith.

Here was the very chance for which I had been angling, but somehow it slipped off my hook before I could get it into the boat.

“I suspect,” I said with miserable weakness, “