Page:O Douglas - Olivia in India.djvu/175

Rh "Miss Aitken's teas!" I said promptly.

Always that scent takes me straight back to sunny summer afternoons when

and myself in a stiffly starched frock, accompanied by three brothers with polished faces and spotless collars setting out to drink tea with our friends Miss Aitken and Miss Elspeth. There was always honey for tea, I remember,—honey made by the bees that buzzed through laborious days in their thatched houses in a corner of the sunny garden,—and little round scones, and crisp shortbread; and, as we ate and chattered, through the open windows the roses nodded in, giving greeting to their friends, the roses of past summers dried and entombed in great vases; and the scent of mignonette so mixed itself with the sound of gentle old voices and childish trebles, the fragrant tea in the fragile china cups, the prancing dragons in the cabinet, that now, over the years, it brings them all back to me as surely, as potently, as if it had been indeed a sprig of Oberon's wild thyme or Ophelia's rosemary for remembrance. As I have told you, we were naughty children, sometimes even wicked children, but our