... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you
go, dear ... and ... forgive _him_ when you can!"

LXXI

Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella
had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering
like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white
perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little
shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose
over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and
blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large
hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:

"Oh, William, it's 'er--it's 'er!"

"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered
peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of
diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's
doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging
into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with
absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of
dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light
eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd
cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and
creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime
was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his
companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of
green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have
advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they
emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.

"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched
the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of
surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.

"Keyse!... It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.

"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful
gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the
green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red,
hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a
kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South
Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and
ri