"Or on nightingales' tongues?" added Charlie.

"You might as well say fatted dormice and snails," said Frank. "One
would think the event had been eighteen hundred years ago."

"Poor Frank! he's stuffed so hard that it is bursting out at all his
pores!" exclaimed Charlie.

"Ah! you have the advantage of your elder, Master Charles!" said
Raymond, with a paternal sound of approbation.

"Till next time," said Frank. "Now, thank goodness, mine is once
for all!"

The conversation drifted away to Venice and the homeward journey,
which Raymond and Cecil seemed to have spent in unremitting sight-
seeing. The quantities of mountains, cathedrals, and pictures they
had inspected was quite appalling.

"How hard you must have worked!" exclaimed Rosamond. "Had you never
a day's rest out of the thirty?"

"Had we, Cecil? I believe not," said Raymond.

"Sundays?" gasped Anne's low voice at his elbow.

"Indeed," triumphantly returned Cecil, "between English service and
High Mass, and Benediction, and the public gardens, and listening to
the band, we had not a single blank Sunday."