Have
you got through with the weather? The moon's out, and it feels more like
the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door
against dor-bugs; I couldn't help it, though they won't be here for six
weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?"
"I don't know. There may be some in the Park," he answered.
"We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton," said Miss
Simpson demurely, looking down. "We don't know what we should do without
them."
"Lemonade!" exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and
saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed
Langbourne to put them. "Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while
I was gone? I will just see about that!" She whipped out of the room,
and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of
sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. "She had kept some for me!
Have you sung _Paloma_ for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?"
"No," said Barbara, "we hadn't got round to it, quite."
"Oh, do!" Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked
her before; it would have saved them from each ether.
"Wait a moment," cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught
of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the
piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the
refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then
tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with
some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song.
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