Original HAT do you mean?' asked Miss Corke, indicating the Parliament House clock with a reproachful parasol, as I joined her a week from the following afternoon outside the south cloister of the Abbey. We had seen a good deal of her in the meantime, but the Abbey visit had been postponed. Her tone was portentous, and I looked at the clock, which said ten minutes to four. I didn't quite understand, for I thought I was in pretty good time. 'Didn't you say I was to come about now?' I inquired. Miss Corke made an inarticulate exclamation of wrath.
'Half-past three may be "about now" in America!' she said, 'but it isn't
here, as you may see by the clock. Fancy my having made an appointment
with a young person who had an idea of keeping it "about" the time I had
condescended to fix!'--and Miss Corke put down her parasol as we entered
the cloisters, and attempted to wither me with a glance. If the glance
had not had the very jolliest smile of good-fellowship inside it I don't
know what I should have done, but as it was I didn't wither; though I
regretted to hear that I had missed the Jerusalem Chamber by being late,
where King Henry died--because he always knew he should expire in a
place of that name, and so fulfilled prophecy, poor dear, by coming to
kneel on the cold stone at St. Edward's shrine, where he would always
say his prayers, and nowhere else, immediately after a number of
extraordinary Christmas dinners--and Miss Corke was not in the least
sorry for me, though it was a thing I ought to see, and we positively
must come another day to see it.
We walked up past the little green square that you see in wide spaces
through the side pillars, where the very oldest old monks lie nameless
and forgotten, whose lives gathered about the foundations of the
Abbey--the grey foundations in the grey past--and sank silently into
its history just as their bodily selves have disappeared long ago in the
mosses and grasses that cover them. 'No, Miss Mamie Wick, of Chicago,
I will not hurry!' said Miss Corke, 'and neither shall you! It is a
sacrilege that I will allow no young person in my company to commit--to
go through these precincts as if there were anything in the world as
well worth looking at outside of them.'