“Home to dinner, darling,” said the girl at last.  “Hardly time to dress if we hurry.  Grumper will simply rampage and roar.  He gets worse every day.”  She disengaged herself from the boy’s arms and her terribly beautiful, painfully exquisite, trance.

“Give me one more kiss, tell me once more that you love me and only me, for ever, and let us go....  God bless this place.  I thank God.  I love God—­now ...” she said.

Dam could not speak at all.

They walked away, hand in hand, incredulous, tremulous, bewildered by the beauty and wonder and glory of Life.

Alas!

As they passed the Lodge and entered the dark avenue, Dam found his tongue.

“Must tell Grumper,” he said.  Nothing mattered since Lucille loved him like that.  She’d be happier in the subaltern’s hut in the plains of India than in a palace.  If Grumper didn’t like it, he must lump it.  Her happiness was more important than Grumper’s pleasure.

“Yes,” acquiesced Lucille, “but tell him on Monday morning when you go.  Let’s have this all to ourselves, darling, just for a few hours.  I believe he’ll be jolly glad.  Dear old bear, isn’t he—­really.”

In the middle of the avenue Lucille stopped.

“Dammy, my son,” quoth she, “tell me the absolute, bare, bald truth.  Much depends upon it and it’ll spoil everything if you aren’t perfectly, painfully honest.”

“Right-O,” responded Dam.  “Go it.”

“Am I the very very loveliest woman that ever lived?”

“No,” replied Dam, “but I wouldn’t have a line of your face changed.”

“Am I the cleverest woman in the world?”

“No.  But you’re quite clever enough for me.  I wouldn’t have you any cleverer.  God forbid.”

“Am I absolutely perfect and without flaw—­in character.”

“No.  But I love your faults.”

“Do you wish to enshrine me in a golden jewel-studded temple and worship me night and day?”

“No.  I want to put you in a house and live with you.”

“Hurrah,” cried the surprising young woman.  “That’s love, Dam.  It’s not rotten idealizing and sentimentalizing that dies away as soon as facts are seen as such.  You’re a man, Dam, and I’m going to be a woman.  I loathe that bleating, glorified nonsense that the Reverend Bill and Captain Luniac and poor old Ormonde and people talk when they’re ‘in love’. Love! It’s just sentimental idealizing and the worship of what does not exist and therefore cannot last.  You love me, don’t you, Dammy, not an impossible figment of a heated imagination?  This will last, dear....  If you’d idealized me into something unearthly and impossible you’d have tired of me in six months or less.  You’d have hated me when you saw the reality, and found yourself tied to it for life.”

“Make a speech, Daughter,” replied Damocles.  “Get on a stump and make a blooming speech.”

Both were a little unstrung.