“You an author!” exclaimed the Major.  “I should as soon have thought of your enlisting in the Marines.”

“It will only be for a few months, uncle—­only till my limited stock of experiences shall be exhausted.  After that I shall be relegated to my natural obscurity, doubtless never to emerge again.”

“Hem,” said the Major, nervously.  “Geordie, my boy, I have by me one or two little poems which I wrote when I was about nineteen—­trifles flung off on the inspiration of the moment.  Perhaps, when you come to know your friend the editor better than you do now, you might induce him to bring them out—­to find an odd corner for them in his magazine.  I shouldn’t want payment for them, you know.  You might just mention that fact; and I assure you that I have seen many worse things than they are in print.”

“What, uncle, you an author!  Oh, fie!  I should as soon have thought of your wishing to dance on the tight-rope as to appear in print.  But we must look over these little effusions—­eh, Miss Hope.  We must unearth this genius, and be the first to give his lucubrations to the world.”

“If you were younger, sir, or I not quite so old, I would box your ears,” said the Major, who seemed hardly to know whether to laugh or be angry.  Finally he laughed, George and Janet chimed in, and all three went back indoors.

After an early dinner the Major took rod and line and set off to capture a few trout for supper.  Aunt Felicite took her post-prandial nap discreetly, in an easy-chair, and Captain George and Miss Hope were left to their own devices.  In Love’s sweet Castle of Indolence the hours that make up a summer afternoon pass like so many minutes.  These two had blown the magic horn and had gone in.  The gates of brass had closed behind them, shutting them up from the common outer world.  Over all things was a glamour as of witchcraft.  Soft music filled the air; soft breezes came to them as from fields of amaranth and asphodel.  They walked ever in a magic circle, that widened before them as they went.  Eros in passing had touched them with his golden dart.  Each of them hid the sweet sting from the other, yet neither of them would have been whole again for anything the world could have offered.  What need to tell the old story over again—­the story of the dawn of love in two young hearts that had never loved before?

Janet went home that night in a flutter of happiness—­a happiness so sweet and strange and yet so vague that she could not have analysed it even had she been casuist enough to try to do so.  But she was content to accept the fact as a fact; beyond that she cared nothing.  No syllable of love had been spoken between her and George:  they had passed what to an outsider would have seemed a very common-place afternoon.  They had talked together—­not sentiment, but every-day topics of the world around them; they had read together—­poetry, but nothing more passionate than “Aurora Leigh;” they had walked together—­rather a silent and stupid walk, our friendly outsider would have urged; but if they were content, no one else had any right to complain.  And so the day had worn itself away—­a red-letter day for ever in the calendar of their young lives.