Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

16 страница из 67

A celebrated Scot has said that the Scotsman without religion is apt to drop into the public-house; an irreligious young man, I would add, with no blasphemy, but a knowledge of mankind and romantic views, can make out of a West End young lady with bowed lips and russet locks, a Divinity as effectual as a stone Virgin between wax candles. Still, your Divinity must have her whims, and not all her whims can shatter her in the eyes of her worshipper. I really don't think that the secrecy was good, but that is a detail. As luck would have it (I remember how, in the agony of the time, I thought some hideous Fate stepped in upon our family ever) as luck would have it, out of my romance came tragedy.

Thrice I had conveyed My Lady to her door and, by her request, parted from her behind some trees that overlooked her father's house. I suspect there was nothing more in it than the chaffing of her brothers; certainly they used to cock an eye in a roguish way upon me at times, and I fancy indeed that we were looked upon as something of a joke. My Lady would have it, at any rate, that I remain in the shadow of the rhododendrons until she had rung and till the flood of light upon the gravel had announced the opening of the door, its extinguishment the closing. I was to count ten—or something of that kind—and then depart.