But there,
to my dismay, stood a charmingly appointed tea-table glittering with
silver and Royal Worcester, with several liveried servants bringing
cakes and muffins and berries to Lady Veratrum, who sat behind the
steaming urn. I started to retreat, when there appeared, walking
towards us, a simple man, with nothing in the least extraordinary
about him.
"That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas," thought I, "a man in a
corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a
Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin."
But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was
presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the
Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and
the battle of Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some
words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked
self-respecting sort of way. Then we talked,--at least the duke and
Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda said a few blameless words, such as
befitted an untitled English virgin in the presence of the nobility;
while I maintained the probationary silence required by Pythagoras
of his first year's pupils. My idea was to observe this first duke
without uttering a word, to talk with the second (if I should ever
meet a second), to chat with the third, and to secure the fourth for
Francesca to take home to America with her.
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