Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/110

 who had eaten too much and had to be scolded and put to bed. The lights were out, the revelry done.

"Going walking now?" asked my namesake. He did not know how to behave at tea-parties, and, sitting at a little distance from us, he had been aiming an imaginary gun at every fat robin that mined the lawn for sustenance.

"Ask your father if you may go," I said. I had heard Solon pacing his room—forever cogitating the imminent Potts. I did not enter the house oftener than I could help, for always in those rooms I felt a troubled presence, a homesick thing that pushed two frail white hands against an intangible but sufficing curtain that held it from those it sickened for. I could not long be easy there.

It was a day poised and serene, with white brush-dabs of cloud on a wonderful canvas of blue,—a day when I longed for the honeyed fragrance of the woods warming from the last night's rain.

But this was not to be my walk. Not for me the shaded arches of the wood where glad birds piped, nor the velvet hillsides tufted with green and yellow and brown, nor eke the quiet lane running between walls of foliage, where simple rabbits scampered, amazed but not yet taught their fullest fear.

The butterflies we must chase hovered rather along urban ways. That of the woman child was social. Ahead of us she flounced. Strangely, she was herself Mrs. Judge Robinson now. I understood that she was decked in a gown of royal purple, whose