A striped awning covered the deck, and great baskets of roses--pink, and
red, and yellow--were placed about here and there. Tea was ready on a
low table, a swinging brass kettle hissing merrily, with an air of
supreme homeliness.
Mr. Smithson had accompanied his _fiancee_ from town, and now sat
reading the _Globe_, and meekly waiting for his tea, while Lesbia took a
languid survey of the shore and the flotilla of boats, little and big,
and while Lady Kirkbank rhapsodised about the yacht, praising
everything, and calling everything by a wrong name. He was to be their
guest all day, and every day. They were to have enough of him, as Lesbia
had observed to her chaperon, with a spice of discontent, not quite so
delighted with the arrangement as her faithful swain. To him the idea
was rapture.
'You have contrived somehow to keep me very much at a distance
hitherto,' he told Lesbia, 'and I feel sometimes as if we were almost
strangers; but a yacht is the best place in the world to bring two
people together, and a week at Cowes will make us nearer to each other
and more to each other than three months in London;' and Lesbia had said
nothing, inwardly revolting at the idea of becoming any nearer and
dearer to this man whom she had pledged herself to marry.
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