do any good work when one is for
ever sticking up one's heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at?
If you'd only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!"

"May I refer you to my speech--not the last one, but the one before
that."

He laughed; then he sighed.

"Ah, my Pretty," he said, "it was all very well, and pleasant enough to
be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now----"

"How often," she asked calmly, "have I told you that you must not call
me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now----"

"Look here," he said, leaning towards her, "there's not a soul about;
they're in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once--it can't
matter to you--and it will mean so very much to me."

"That's just it," she said; "if it didn't mean----"

"Then it shan't mean anything but good-bye. It's only about eight years
since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion."

She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she
looked at him.

"Very well," she said suddenly.

"No," he said; "I won't have it unless it _does_ mean something."

There was a silence. "Our dance, I think?" said the voice of one bending
before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom
she had been hiding.

Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with
her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed
more than once. "I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,"
she said; "and I wish--yes, I do wish he had. I don't suppose he'll care
a bit for me when I come back."

So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses
on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with
her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to
have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his
life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father's
park from her father's rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a
wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured
him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way
the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday
had seen his own jovial return.

"Do you all the good in the world, my boy. 'Pon my soul, you have a
tired sort of look, as if you'd got some of these jolly new diseases
people have taken to dying of