“Oh dear no!” Miss Daye replied. “There is nothing in the world to interfere!”
“My darling child, you _have_ relieved my mind! I was so afraid that some silly little fad—I know how much you dislike the glare of the river——” then, forgetfully, “I will write at once and accept for us all.” Mrs. Daye implanted a kiss upon her daughter’s forehead, with a sense that she was picturesquely acknowledging dutiful obedience, and rustled out. “Robert Helmont” remained on the floor beside her chair, and an indefinitely pleasant freshness was diffused where she had been.
As Rhoda twisted her hair a little uncontrollable smile came to her lips and stayed there. “Ayah, worthy one,” she said, “give me the letter from the bed”; and having read what she had written she slowly tore it into very small pieces. “After all,” she reflected, “that would be a stupid way.”
The opinion was a united one on board the _Annie Laurie_ the next Sunday afternoon that Nature had left nothing undone to make the occasion a success. This might have testified to less than it did; for a similar view has been expressed as unanimously, and adhered to as firmly, on board the _Annie Laurie_ when the banks of the Hooghly have been grey with deluge and the ladies have saved their skirts by sitting on one another’s knees in her tiny cabin. The _Annie Laurie_ being the Lieutenant-Governor’s steam-launch, nobody but the Lieutenant-Governor presumes to be anything but complimentary as to the weather experienced aboard her. And this in India is natural. It could not be said, however, that there was anything necessarily diplomatic even in Mrs. Daye’s appreciation of this particular afternoon. The air—they all dilated on the air—blew in from the sea, across the salt marshes, through the plantains and the cocoanut-trees of the little villages, and brought a dancing crispness, softened by the sun. The brown river hurtled outwards past her buoys, and a great merchant ship at anchor in midstream swung slowly round with the tide. A vague concourse of straight masts and black hulls and slanting funnels stretched along the bank behind them with the indefiniteness that comes of multitude, for every spar and line stood and swung clear cut in the glittering sun; and the point they were bound for elbowed itself out into the river two miles farther down, in the grey greenness of slanting, pluming palms. Already the water was growing more golden where the palms toppled over the river: there would not be more than two good hours of daylight. As Mrs. Daye remarked to the Lieutenant-Governor, life was all too short in the cold weather really to absorb, to drink in, the beauties of nature—there was so much going on.