III
And a half-hour subsequently, true to my word, I was scaling a ten-foot stone wall, thickly overgrown with ivy. At the top of it I paused, and sat down to take breath and to meditate, my legs meanwhile bedangling over an as flourishing Italian garden as you would wish to see.
“Now, I wonder,” I queried, of my soul, “what will be next? There is a very cheerful uncertainty about what will be next. It may be a spring-gun, and it may be a bulldog, and it may be a susceptible heiress. But it is apt to be—No, it isn’t,” I amended, promptly; “it is going to be an angel. Or perhaps it is going to be a dream. She can’t be real, you know—I am probably just dreaming her. I would be quite certain I was just dreaming her, if this wall were not so humpy and uncomfortable. For it stands to reason, I would not be fool enough to dream of such unsympathetic iron spikes as I am sitting on.”
“Perhaps you are not aware,” hazarded a soprano voice, “that this is private property?”
“Why, no,” said I, very placidly; “on the contrary I was just thinking it must be heaven. And I am tolerably certain,” I commented further, in my soul, “that you are one of the more influential seraphim.”
The girl had lifted her brows. She sat upon a semicircular stone bench, some twenty feet from the wall, and had apparently been reading, for a book lay open in her lap. She now inspected me, with a sort of languid wonder in her eyes, and I returned the scrutiny with unqualified approval in mine.
And in this I had reason. The heiress of Selwoode was eminently good to look upon.