While George and Billie Dore wandered to the rose garden to

interview the man in corduroys, Maud had been seated not a hundred

yards away--in a very special haunt of her own, a cracked stucco

temple set up in the days of the Regency on the shores of a little

lily-covered pond. She was reading poetry to Albert the page.

Albert the page was a recent addition to Maud's inner circle. She

had interested herself in him some two months back in much the same

spirit as the prisoner in his dungeon cell tames and pets the

conventional mouse. To educate Albert, to raise him above his

groove in life and develop his soul, appealed to her romantic

nature as a worthy task, and as a good way of filling in the time.

It is an exceedingly moot point--and one which his associates of

the servants' hall would have combated hotly--whether Albert

possessed a soul. The most one could say for certain is that he

looked as if he possessed one. To one who saw his deep blue eyes

and their sweet, pensive expression as they searched the middle

distance he seemed like a young angel. How was the watcher to know

that the thought behind that far-off gaze was simply a speculation

as to whether the bird on the cedar tree was or was not within

range of his catapult? Certainly Maud had no such suspicion. She

worked hopefully day by day to rouse Albert to an appreciation of

the nobler things of life.

Not but what it was tough going. Even she admitted that. Albert's

soul did not soar readily. It refused to leap from the earth. His

reception of the poem she was reading could scarcely have been

called encouraging. Maud finished it in a hushed voice, and looked

pensively across the dappled water of the pool. A gentle breeze

stirred the water-lilies, so that they seemed to sigh.

"Isn't that beautiful, Albert?" she said.

Albert's blue eyes lit up. His lips parted eagerly, "That's the first hornet I seen this year," he said pointing.

Maud felt a little damped.

"Haven't you been listening, Albert?"

"Oh, yes, m'lady! Ain't he a wopper, too?"

"Never mind the hornet, Albert."

"Very good, m'lady."

"I wish you wouldn't say 'Very good, m'lady'. It's like--like--"

She paused. She had been about to say that it was like a butler,

but, she reflected regretfully, it was probably Albert's dearest

ambition to be like a butler. "It doesn't sound right. Just say

'Yes'."

"Yes, m'lady."

Maud was not enthusiastic about the 'M'lady', but she let it go.

After all, she had not quite settled in her own mind what exactly

she wished Albert's attitude towards herself to be. Broadly

speaking, she wanted him to be as like as he could to a medieval

page, one of those silk-and-satined little treasures she had read

about in the Ingoldsby Legends. And, of course, they presumably

said 'my lady'. And yet--she felt--not for the first time--that it

is not easy, to revive the Middle Ages in these curious days. Pages

like other things, seem to have changed since then.




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