第108章

"I love the spring," he murmured to himself."I am sentimental about it.I love sentimentality, in myself, when I am quite alone.If I had been a writing person, I should have made verses every year in April and sent them to magazines-- and they would have been returned to me."The Indolent Apprentice was, it is true, fat, though comely, and he was also entirely deserving of his name.Like his Grace of Stone, however, he had seen other and livelier days, and now and then he was beset by recollections.He was still a rather high, though slow, stepper--the latter from fixed preference.He had once stepped fast, as well as with a spirited gait.During his master's indisposition he had stood in his loose box and professed such harmlessness that he had not been annoyed by being taken out for exercise as regularly as he might have been.He had champed his oats and listened to the repartee of the stable-boys, and he had, perhaps, felt the coming of the spring when the cuckoo insisted upon it with thrilling mellowness across the green sweeps of the park land.Sometimes it made him sentimental, as it made his master, sometimes it made him stamp his small hoofs restlessly in his straw and want to go out.He did not intend, when he was taken out, to emulate the Industrious Apprentice by hastening his pace unduly and raising false hopes for the future, but he sniffed in the air the moist green of leafage and damp moss, massed with yellow primroses cuddling in it as though for warmth, and he thought of other fresh scents and the feel of the road under a pony's feet.

Therefore, when he found himself out in the world again, he shook his head now and then and even tossed it with the recurring sensations of a pony who was a mere boy and still slight in the waist.

"You feel it too, do you? " said the duke."I won't remind you of your years."The drive from Stone Hover to the village of Temple Barholm was an easy one, of many charms of leaf-arched lanes and green- edged road.

The duke had always had a partiality for it, and he took it this morning.He would probably have taken it in any case, but Mrs.

Braddle's anecdotes had been floating through his mind when he set forth and perhaps inclined him in its direction.