“But, I ask you.”

He shook his head.

She put her face closer and whispered.  “Cheetah! big beast of my heart.  Do you hear your mate asking for something?”

He turned his eyes back to the mountains.  “I must go my own way.”

“Haven’t I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah?  Can’t you trust the leopard’s wisdom?”

He stared at the coast inexorably.

“I wonder,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You are that, Cheetah, that lank, long, eager beast—.”

Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse.  She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes.  “Look here, sir, it was you, wasn’t it?  It was your powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess—­”

“Amanda!”

“Well.”  She wrinkled her brows.

He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.

“Look here, Amanda!” he said, “if you think that you are going to make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of social assertion—­by that, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!”

Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.

“This, Cheetah, is the morning mood,” she remarked.

“This is the essential mood.  Listen, Amanda—­”

He stopped short.  He looked towards the gangway, they both looked.  The magic word “Breakfast” came simultaneously from them.

“Eggs,” she said ravenously, and led the way.

A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald’s trumpet had called a truce between them.

3

Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and variety.  Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in the marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only one untoward event.  The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the earnest advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and fled with a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an uproar of inadequately smothered sorrow came as an obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages of the service.  Amanda appeared unaware of the incident at the time, but afterwards she explained things to Benham.  “Curates,” she said, “are such pent-up men.  One ought, I suppose, to remember that.  But he never had anything to go upon at all—­not anything—­except his own imaginations.”

“I suppose when you met him you were nice to him.”

“I was nice to him, of course. . . .”

They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of this infatuated divine.  His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely and transitorily did they ever think of him again.