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Yet even the beginning had a flavor of the unusual about it, strong enough to startle a man so used to a humdrum life and so unversed in anything out of the common as I. Here, then, is the beginning: One morning, as I sat smoking my after-breakfast cigar in my rooms in St. James' Street, my friend Gustave de Berensac rushed in.
To hide it, she turned abruptly away; and the door closed upon her. After a moderately bright morning, that after-breakfast fog which we owe to the British kitchen and the domestic hearth was descending on the Strand.
It was finally left an open question for the afternoon to settle; and, upon her urging, he went out for a walk. She stood at the window to watch him, and, when she saw that he turned northward, she sank into a chair, instead of going to give Joe Varden his after-breakfast instructions, and fell into a deep reverie.
Some short distance from the shack was a clearing in the woods, a thriving wilderness of bramble-bushes, poke-berries, myrtle-berries, mandrakes, milkweed, mullein, daisies and what not a paradise of every sauntering vine and splendid, saucy weed. In the centre stood a sycamore-tree, beneath which it was my custom to smoke a morning pipe and revolve my profound after-breakfast thoughts.
Cawsons, the mansion in which he was born, was situated at the junction of the James and Appomattox, in full view of City Point and Bermuda Hundred, and only an after-breakfast walk from Dutch Gap. The mansion long ago disappeared, and nothing now marks its site but negro huts.
An after-breakfast summons to the President's study brought their pranks vividly to mind again, however, and with considerable trepidation they saw the heavy door close behind them, shutting them in alone with the grave-eyed man, for they stood much in awe of the learned Doctor when that stern look replaced the usual bluff kindliness of his face.
I was sitting at the window one morning smoking an after-breakfast pipe a pipe which Sonia had brought me back from Plymouth at the same time as the books when I heard a loud ring at the front door-bell, followed by a couple of sharp knocks. Despite my three years' absence from worldly affairs, I recognized the unmistakable touch of a telegraph-boy.
I respectfully swerved aside, not wishing, in this particular case, to come under the provisions of that unsound rule which judges a man by the clothes he wears. Presently I became aware of the jingle of a horse-bell, and the smoke of a camp-fire; and, close to the river, I found a tilted spring-cart, near which an elderly man, with tattooed arms, sat on a log, enjoying his after-breakfast smoke.
"I was meaning" waving her hand expansively "big things." "And when you've got your own house, my dear," retorted Joan, "you'll find those commonplaces of existence assume alarmingly big proportions." Soon after Stair had finished his after-breakfast pipe, the chiming of the bells announced that it was time to prepare for church.
From the moment when, somewhat to my surprise, he had appeared upon the terrace just as I was finishing my after-breakfast pipe, no word of any more serious subject had passed our lips. We had talked and passed the time very much as any other host and guest the first morning in a quiet country house. We were standing now upon a little knoll in the park, and I was pointing out my deer.
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