Book 2 The Land of Mockery Chapter 19

"Could you not drink her gaze like wine? 
Yet in its splendor swoon Into the silence languidly, 
As a tune into a tune?" 
DANTE ROSSETTI.

On the morning of the twenty-fifth of May, Thelma, Lady Bruce-Errington, sat at breakfast with her husband in their sun-shiny morning-room, fragrant with flowers and melodious with the low piping of a tame thrush in a wild gilded cage, who had the sweet habit of warbling his strophes to himself very softly now and then, before venturing to give them full-voiced utterance. A bright-eyed, feathered poet he was, and an exceeding favorite with his fair mistress, who occasionally leaned back in her low chair to look at him and murmur an encouraging "Sweet, sweet!" which caused the speckled plumage on his plump breast to ruffle up with suppressed emotion and gratitude.

Philip was pretending to read the Times, but the huge, self-important printed sheet had not the faintest interest for him,--his eyes wandered over the top of its columns to the golden gleam of his wife's hair, brightened just then by the sunlight streaming through the window,--and finally he threw it down beside him with a laugh.

"There's no news," he declared. "There never is any news!"

Thelma smiled, and her deep-blue eyes sparkled.

"No?" she half inquired--then taking her husband's cup from his hand to re-fill it with coffee, she added, "but I think you do not give yourself time to find the news, Philip. You will never read the papers more than five minutes."