“Oh, no!  I’m booked.  It’s no use your falling in love with me.”

“I wouldn’t—­presume to do such a thing,” he stammered, somewhat scared.  “I think love is serious.  It’s like an invention:  sometimes it lies deep down inside you, great and quiet—­and at other times it racks you and keeps you from sleeping.”

“Oho!” cried Emmy.  “So you know all about it.  You are in love.  Now, tell me, who is she?”

“It was many years ago,” said Septimus.  “She wore pigtails and I burned a hole in her pinafore with a toy cannon and she slapped my face.  Afterwards she married a butcher.”

He looked at her with his wan smile, and again raised his hat and ran his hand through his hair.  Emmy was not convinced.

“I believe,” she said, “you have fallen in love with Zora.”

He did not reply for a moment or two; then he touched her arm.

“Please don’t say that,” he said, in an altered tone.

Emmy edged up close to him, as they walked.  It was her nature, even while she teased, to be kind and caressing.

“Not even if it’s true?  Why not?”

“Things like that are not spoken of,” he said soberly.  “They’re only felt.”

This time it was she who put a hand on his arm, with a charming, sisterly air.

“I hope you won’t make yourself miserable over it.  You see, Zora is impossible.  She’ll never marry again.  I do hope it’s not serious.  Is it?” As he did not answer, she continued:  “It would be such—­such rot wasting your life over a thing you haven’t a chance of getting.”

“Why?” said Septimus.  “Isn’t that the history of the best lives?”

This philosophic plane was too high for Emmy, who had her pleasant being in a less rarified atmosphere.  “To want, to get, to enjoy,” was the guiding motto of her existence.  What was the use of wanting unless you got, and what was the use of getting unless you enjoyed?  She came to the conclusion that Septimus was only sentimentally in love with Zora, and she regarded his tepid passion as a matter of no importance.  At the same time her easy discovery delighted her.  It invested Septimus with a fresh air of comicality.

“You’re just the sort of man to write poetry about her.  Don’t you?”

“Oh, no!” said Septimus.

“Then what do you do?”

“I play the bassoon,” said he.

Emmy clapped her hands with joy, thereby scaring a hen that was straying on the common.

“Another accomplishment?  Why didn’t you tell us?  I’m sure Zora doesn’t know of it.  Where did you learn?”

“Wiggleswick taught me,” said he.  “He was once in a band.”

“You must bring it round,” cried Emmy.

But when Septimus, prevailed on by her entreaties, did appear with the instrument in Mrs. Oldrieve’s drawing-room, he made such unearthly and terrific noises that Mrs. Oldrieve grew pale and Zora politely but firmly took it from his hands and deposited it in the umbrella-stand in the hall.