She felt it impossible to sit still; something bubbled up within her like fire; it was a touch of the old exhilaration she had felt on cold mornings in the sea at Lashnagar.  She wanted to take his hands and go flying away with him, jumping from star to star in the thrilling blue sky.  As it was she stood on one foot, as if poised for flight with a sort of spring in her movements that his softer muscles had never experienced.  He caught at her hand, and felt it taut, and queerly, individually alive.

“Oh, do say something nice!” she cried.  “Louis, I’ve a good mind to push you off the roof—­like the queen bee.”

They had been reading about the queen bee’s amiable dealings with her lovers a few days ago.

“Well, I’m damned!” he cried.  He got an impression of her as a captive balloon that had dragged loose its grapnel, and was being tugged at by currents far above the earth, where the air was heavy and motionless.  He gripped her hand still tighter.

“Look here, young person, you sit down here and tell me all you mean,” he said.  She stared at him.  He suddenly looked much more responsible.  It was the doctor in him suddenly awakened to new life.  He had not felt the birth struggles of the lover or the father yet.

“But you’re not ill and tired like women are.  I can’t believe it,” he objected, frowning with a sort of diagnostic eye upon her.

“Why should I be?” she said, laughing and rumpling his hair which was very straight and neat and made him look too elderly for her wakened mood of ecstasy.  “It’s too splendid!  It’s a funny thing, I’ve never thought of having babies before.  I’ve always been a Knight, you know.  And knights don’t have babies.  Oh Louis, wouldn’t they look funny, riding out to battle with babies on a pillion behind them?  Fancy Parsifal with a baby!  Or St. George!  Yet why shouldn’t they have them?  And why shouldn’t they go to battle?  It would be good training for them, wouldn’t it?  They’re so soft.”

It was impossible for him to stop her.  For the first time in her life her tongue was loosened; she talked floods of nonsense, happy, enchanted nonsense.  But Louis would not lose his diagnostic eye.

“But didn’t you know before?” he persisted.

“No.  Do you think I’d have been such a selfish hog as to keep it to myself?”

“But you’ve read biology—­you ought to have known how things happen.”

“Oh, bother biology!  Who ever thought of biology meaning themselves?  I didn’t, anyway.  I never think things in books refer to me.  Fancy a skeleton meaning oneself!  Mustn’t a skeleton feel immodest?  Louis, when I’m dead, do find some way of disintegrating me, will you?  I couldn’t bear to look as immodest as a skeleton does.”

After awhile she became quiet, but still bubbling over with irrepressible happiness.  Louis was unusually gentle as they sat talking in whispers as though afraid the stars would hear their secret as they came out one by one and looked at them.