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"And don't you think he knows that?" asked Biddy. "Biddy, what do you mean?" Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands, and the smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane, said, "Have you never considered that he may be proud?" "Proud?" I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.
In the southwest corner an immense black-currant bush was growing on both sides of the fence. Out in the field below the garden two Bell-pear trees, as large as elms, were bending their branches, loaded with fruit, a luscious promise for the autumn-time. A button-pear tree, just beyond, was making up in quantity what its fruit lacked in quality.
"Thought you were never coming," said Miss Kybird, tartly, as she led the way to the back room and took her seat at the untidy tea-tray. "And you've been crying your eyes out, I suppose," remarked Mr. Nugent, as he groped in the depths of a tall jar for black-currant jam. "Well, you're not the first, and I don't suppose you'll be the last. How's Teddy?"
"Thought you were never coming," said Miss Kybird, tartly, as she led the way to the back room and took her seat at the untidy tea-tray. "And you've been crying your eyes out, I suppose," remarked Mr. Nugent, as he groped in the depths of a tall jar for black-currant jam. "Well, you're not the first, and I don't suppose you'll be the last. How's Teddy?"
She had very little appetite, and never found out how Mysie was fulfilling her resolution of kindness by baulking Wilfred of sundry attempts to tease; by substituting her own kissing-crust for Dolly's more unpoetical piece of bread; and offering to exchange her delicious strawberry-jam tartlet for the black-currant one at which her cousin was looking with reluctant eyes.
Was black-currant rum a thing for a poor beggar like him to begin drinking and on a weekday, too? No, indeed! "Yes, and you'll be coming to the christening-party, you two, of course," said Kalle, relieved, putting the bottle into the cupboard. "But we'll have a 'cuckoo, for there's a drop of spirits left from Christmas Eve, and I expect mother'll give us coffee."
Private Montease, complaining of slight rawness of chest, but otherwise well, returned to duty. Oct. 5. Cough worse again. Private Montease thinks that with care it may turn to bronchitis. Borrowed an A.B.C. Oct. 6. Private Montease relates uncanny experience. Woke up with feeling of suffocation to find an enormous black-currant and glycerine jujube wedged in his gullet.
I did not care for the cards; for though we always played seven hours on a stretch, and I always lost, my losings were never more than nineteenpence a night: but there was some infernal sour black-currant wine, that the old lady always produced at dinner, and with the tray at ten o'clock, and which I dared not refuse; though upon my word and honour it made me very unwell.
"It's rum though," he said to himself, as he crouched there, and now softly picked a leaf to nibble, and feel suggestions of taking a powder in a spoonful of black-currant jelly, so strong was the flavour in the leaf. "Very rum," he thought. "One's wide-awake, and the next moment fast asleep."
This they skirted, coming close to me as I stood in the shadow of a pear-tree. "Come along quick!" I heard; and then the two figures went on rustling and crashing among the black-currant bushes, so that I could smell the peculiar herbaceous medicine-scent they gave out.
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