"How to describe the meeting between Alicia and the Duke!" the
painstaking author would think. Should she rise with heightened colour,
her fingers convulsively clutching that portion of the anatomy under
which, as it is popularly believed, a fluttering heart thrills at the
familiar footstep? Should she run to him hysterically, falling upon his
neck and sobbing for very joy? It is a style which has exponents
amongst the very best authors.
Happy am I, that I am not called upon to invent so difficult a scene.
It is the glorious privilege of the reporter that he need not invent.
Unless he draws a very high salary indeed, to record events, not as they
happened, but as they ought to have happened.
In truth she rose with a heightened colour when the Duke was announced,
but she offered him her hand conventionally, and--when the door had
closed behind the reluctant servant--he took her in his arms and kissed
her again and again.
I do not know how many times because I was not present, but I should say
quite six times.
(Six of course is merely an estimate covering their first greeting.)
"So you're back?" she smiled.
He held her hands in his.
(It would be absurd and presumptuous in me to pretend to give anything
that professed to be an exact account of this meeting. I repeat that I
was not present.)
"I was so horribly afraid," she said earnestly, "I thought when that
dreadful man disappeared that possibly he might have followed you,
and...."
Let us, as the mid-Victorian novelists said, when they found their
powers of description failed, draw a veil over that happy meeting, far
too sacred ... and too difficult...