Faithful friend! never yet was it known to quit me, and here it is!  I decide to have tea in my own boudoir.  Tea is informal, and one need not be waited on at it.  When it comes, I try to dawdle over it as much as possible, to sip my tea with labored slowness, and bite each mouthful with conscientious care.  When I have finished, I think with satisfaction that I cannot have occupied less than half an hour.  Again I consult my watch.  Exactly twelve minutes.  It is now five minutes to eight; two hours and five minutes more!  I sigh loudly, and putting on my hat stroll out into the wide and silent garden.  It is as yet unfamiliar to me.  I do not know where half the walks lead.  I have no favorite haunts, no chosen spot of solitude and greenery, where old and pleasant thoughts meet me.  Many such have I at home, but none here.  I wander objectlessly, pleasurelessly about with Vick—­apparently sharing my depression—­ trotting subduedly, with tail half-mast high, at my heels, and at length sit down on a bench under a mulberry-tree.  The scentless flame of the geraniums and calceolarias fills, without satisfying my eyes; the gnats’ officious hum offends my ears; and thoughts in comparison of which the calceolarias are sweet and the gnats melodious, occupy my mind.

Sir Roger will most likely be drowned on his voyage out.  Bobby will almost certainly be sent to Hong-Kong, and, as a natural consequence, die of a putrid fever.  Algy has just entered the army; there can be no two opinions as to our going to war immediately with either Russia or America.  Algy will probably be among the first to fall, and will die, grasping his colors, and shouting “Victory!” or “Westminster Abbey!” or perhaps both.

I have not yet decided what he shall be shouting, when the current of my thoughts is turned by seeing some one—­thank Heaven, not a footman, this time!—­advancing across the sward toward me.  Surely I know the nonchalant lounge of that walk—­the lazy self-consciousness of that gait, though, when last I saw it, it was not on dewy English turf, but on the baking flags of a foreign town.  It is Mr. Musgrave.  Until this moment I have ungratefully forgotten his existence, and all the interesting facts he told me connected with his existence—­how his lodge faces ours—­how he has no father nor mother, and lives by himself at an abbey.  Alas! in this latter particular, can I not feel for him?  Am I not living by myself at a hall?

Vick recognizes him at about the same moment as I do.  Having first sprung at him with that volubility of small but hostile yaps, with which she strikes terror into the hearts of tramps, she has now—­having smelt him to be not only respectable, but an acquaintance—­changed her behavior to a little servile whine and a series of high jumps at his hand.

“It is you, is it?” cry I, springing up and running to meet him with an elate sensation of company and sociability; “I had quite forgotten that you lived near here.  I’m so glad!”