been to one’s own. Presently the melting music of the tenor’s last aria brought their eyes together in a smile not altogether sad.
That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrénées, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.
Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They accepted—when was a professor known to refuse a good dinner? Rosamond was presented with her emeralds, and, as St. Peter afterward observed to his wife, practically all the guests in the dining-room were participants in the happy event. Lillian was doubtless right when she told him that, all the same, his fellow professors went away from the Blackstone that night respecting Godfrey St. Peter more than they had ever done before, and if they had marriageable daughters, they were certainly envying him his luck.
“That,” her husband replied, “is my chief objection to public magnificence; it seems to show everybody up in the worst possible light. I’m not finding fault with anyone but myself, understand. When I consented to occupy an apartment I couldn’t afford, I let myself in for whatever might follow.”
They got back to Hamilton in bitter weather. The lake winds were scourging the town, and Scott had laryngitis and was writing prose