"Well, now you must send me news of your side. I wish I could tell you what he is going to do, but D'Aubigné says that is a secret. One thing he has told me, and that is that they are going to fit the machine with a wireless telephone so that he can talk to _The Morning_ office while he is flying. Wonders will never cease!
"I like Mac's colour prints. The effect of the sky over the steamer is quite topping. Where painting in oil on a copper plate seems to fail is in the detail. The colour spreads so. The red port light of the vessel is much too large. However, I shall certainly spoil some paper trying to out-do Mac.
"Kind regards to all. Write soon, "Yours ever, "CECIL."
As I folded up the sheets and thrust them into the envelope, Mac looked across at me. Seeing that I had no inkling of his thought he remarked with some slight irritation:
"Wonder when the deuce that chap's coming back?"
"Where's he gone?" asked Bill, holding up the collar bag to see the effect.
"Oh," I said, "Mediterranean, I suppose."
To us the Mediterranean is a far-off beautiful dream. We sat trying to visualize for ourselves the incredible fate of visiting the Mediterranean as we might take the cars for Broadway. I heard Bill sigh softly. Mac's voice, when he spoke, was gruff.
"I'd ask the kids if I were you," he said.
Sometimes, it must be admitted, we get homesick. It generally happens when we have letters from home. We felt rather keenly then, the shrewd poignancy of Mr. Carville's description of himself as an alien. But to us it implied a subdued if passionate desire to see again the quiet landscape of England. The painter-cousin's sketch of the aeroplane near a rick, sunk in the ditch by a hedge, in the clear transparent afternoon light of late October, appealed to us. To see a quickset hedge again ... we sighed.
No doubt we would have allowed the daily flow and return of life's business to oust our neighbours' fortunes from our minds, and waited patiently for Mr. Carville's reappearance, had not a most exciting game of cow-boys, a game in which I for the nonce was a fleeing Indian brave, led to an abrupt encounter with Mrs. Carville. Benvenuto Cellini's scalp already hung at my girdle, visible as a pocket-handkerchief; and he lay far down near the cabbages, to the imaginative eye a writhing and disgusting spectacle. The intrepid Giuseppe Mazzini, however, had thrown his lariat about me with no mean adroitness, and I was down and captured. This thrilling _dénouement_ was enacted near the repaired fence, and any horror I may have simulated was suddenly made real by the appearance of Mrs. Carville, who had been feeding her fowls. When one is prone on the grass, a clothes-line drawn tight about one's arms, and a triumphant cow-boy of eight years in the very act of placing his foot on one's neck, it is difficult to look dignified. The sudden intrusion of an unsympathetic personality will banish the romantic illusion.