Page:The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina's Reasons, The Path of Duty, Four Meetings (Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., 1885).djvu/151

Rh the old lady had been found weeping in the belief that it was Washington's grave. While this monument was under inspection Vogelstein and Pandora had the house to themselves, and they spent some time on a pretty terrace, upon which certain windows of the second floor opened,—a little roofless veranda, which overhung, in a manner, obliquely, all the magnificence of the view, the immense sweep of the river, the artistic plantations, the last-century garden, with its big box hedges and remains of old espaliers. They lingered here for nearly half an hour, and it was in this spot that Vogelstein enjoyed the only approach to intimate conversation that fate had in store for him with a young woman in whom he had been unable to persuade himself that he was not interested. It is not necessary, and it is not possible, that I should reproduce this colloquy; but I may mention that it began as they leaned against the parapet of the terrace and heard the cheerful voice of the showman wafted up to them from a distance with his saying to her, rather abruptly, that he could n't make out why they had n't had more talk together when they crossed the ocean.

"Well, I can, if you can't," said Pandora. "I would have talked, if you had spoken to me. I spoke to you first."

"Yes, I remember that," Vogelstein replied, rather awkwardly.

"You listened too much to Mrs. Dangerfield."

"To Mrs. Dangerfield?"