't have bothered with it.

She--that word henceforth meant Zena--had just come back from
her boarding-school, and of all times of year coming back from a
boarding-school and for wearing a white shirt waist and a crimson
tie and for carrying a tennis racket on the stricken street of a
town--commend me to the month of June in Mariposa.

And, for Pupkin, straight away the whole town was irradiated with
sunshine, and there was such a singing of the birds, and such a dancing
of the rippled waters of the lake, and such a kindliness in the faces
of all the people, that only those who have lived in Mariposa, and been
young there, can know at all what he felt.

The simple fact is that just the moment he saw Zena Pepperleigh, Mr.
Pupkin was clean, plumb, straight, flat, absolutely in love with her.

Which fact is so important that it would be folly not to close the
chapter and think about it.

EIGHT. The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin

Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the judge's
house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the book would
fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled yearning in her
violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even when she picked up
the apple that lay beside her and took another bite out of it.

With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful
day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes,
it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was
rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube. At
other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over the
blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms towards
France to say farewell to it.

Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed
to rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was
kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her
humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald was
getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the least
suggestion of anything of the sort.

Or, if it wasn't that, then her lover had just returned to her side,
tall and soldierly and sunburned, after fighting for ten years in the
Soudan for her sake, and had come back to ask her for her answer and
to tell her that for ten years her face had been with him even in
the watches of the n