The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Here is your Lady Boy, your �little haughty moon,’ and you haven’t even said, �Good morning, Little Lady Boy, was your sleep sweet and gentle?’”

And Dick Forrest forsook the statistical columns of Professor Kenealy’s inoculations, pressed his wife closer, kissed her, but with insistent right fore-finger maintained his place in the pages of the pamphlet.

Nevertheless, the very terms of her “reproof” prevented him from asking what he should have asked – the prosperity of her night since the boudoir cap had been left upon his sleeping porch.

He shut the pamphlet on his right fore-finger, at the place he intended to resume, and added his right arm to his left about her.

“Oh!” she cried. “Oh! Oh! Listen!”

From without came the flute-calls of quail. She quivered against him with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes.

“The coveys are breaking up[135 - The coveys are breaking up – (разг.) Начинается токованье],” he said.

“It means spring,” Paula cried.

“And the sign that good weather has come.”

“And love!”

“And nest-building and egg-laying,” Dick laughed. “Never has the world seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding. You should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories.

It’s a wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is that applause? Or is it a riot?”

Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears, till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound – no less wild, no less musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant, compelling by very vastitude of volume.

The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again, unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:

“I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the Mountain Lad’s.