bobbed head in the direction of Lady Auriol and Colonel Lackaday.

"Perhaps we ought," said I.

"They don't want us--you can bet your boots," said she.

"How do you know that, young woman of wisdom?"

She sniffed. "Look at 'em."

I looked at 'em; mole-visioned masculine fifty seeing through the eyes of
feminine thirteen; and, seeing very distinctly indeed, I said:

"What would you like to do?"

"If you wouldn't mind very much," she replied eagerly, her interest in, or
her scorn of, elderly romance instantly vanishing, "let us go back to the
peaches. That's the beauty of Sundays. That silly old ass Jenkins"--Jenkins
was the head gardener--"is giving his family a treat, instead of coming
down on me. See?"

Evadne linked her arm in mine. Again I saw. She had already eaten two
peaches. Who was I to stand in the way of her eating a third or a fourth or
a fifth? With the after consequences of her crime against Jenkins, physical
and otherwise, I had nothing to do. It was the affair of her parents, her
doctor, her Creator. But the sight of the rapturous enjoyment on her face
when her white teeth bit into the velvet bloom of the fruit sped one back
to one's own youth and procured a delight not the less intense because it
was vicarious.