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"I don't think it's a sign of degeneracy," the lady remarked. "He rhymes very prettily to me." A London phrenologist, and a friendly Oxford Professor of poetry, quieted Sir Austin's fears.
But when, on that memorable night in which he had narrated to his thrilling listeners the dark tale of a fellow-sufferer's woe and crime, betraying in the tale, to my father's quick sympathy, his own sorrow and passion, it did not need much of his gentler brother's subtle art to learn or guess the whole, nor much of Austin's mild persuasion to convince Roland that he had not yet exhausted all efforts to track the wanderer and reclaim the erring child.
But the figure coming towards her through the dusk was much smaller than Austin's and a voice answered her, in broken English, "It ain't Mr. Gray, missus. It's me." "Why, Peter!" she said in amazement; "is anything the matter at the farm?" "No, missus; not vat you'd called vrong." "What is it, then? Will you come up and sit down?"
"A tight little craft," was Austin's invariable comment on the matron; and she looked it, always trim and trig and smooth of surface like a converted yacht cleared for action. Near her wandered her husband, orientally bland, invariably affable, and from time to time squinting sideways, as usual, in the ever-renewed expectation that he might catch a glimpse of his stiff, retroussé moustache.
He raised his eyes to hers for an instant and then dropped them. Sylvia went on. "I don't pretend to know all the ins and outs of this Colorado business. It may be that it was quixotic on Austin's part. Maybe it has upset business conditions out there a lot. It's too complicated to be sure about how anything, I suppose, is likely to affect an industrial society.
They had moved from the place where they had lived when Austin went away and were instead in a house near a thriving town not very far distant. I say they were living here, but in reality the family was broken up, for Henry Hill had fulfilled Austin's greatest fear, and had allowed the children to become scattered till there were none of them at home.
She drives up with her mother, and I wait for her there in the bay-window. It's getting hard for me to distinguish her now, but I recognize the hoofbeats I can tell them every time." "But I don't understand." "I pretend to be very weak," explained the elder man, with a guilty flush. "I sit in the big chair yonder and my Jap boy waits on her. She is very kind." Austin's voice grew husky.
Austin could not work in the woods because of the rain, and his presence irritated his father all the time. They were never in the house together but what something unpleasant was said between them, and Austin's spirit was becoming worn with the constant rasping.
"Austin is apparently blind to everything but her beauty, which is really noticeable, not that it matters. What is mere beauty beside such refinement as Sally's, for instance, how far will it go with OUR FRIENDS when they discover that Austin's wife is an untrained, common little country girl?
The envoys hastily read and wrote; in a few hours Austin was again on the road, this time bound to de Vergennes at Versailles, to tell the great tidings. Soon all Paris got the news and burst into triumphant rejoicing over the disaster to England. Austin's next errand was a secret and singular one.
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