It is a pleasure, when one has been able hitherto to portray George’s devotion only through the medium of his speeches, to produce these comestibles as Exhibit A, to show that he loved Aline with no common love; for it had not been an easy task to get them there.  In a house of smaller dimensions he would have raided the larder without shame, but at Blandings Castle there was no saying where the larder might be.  All he knew was that it lay somewhere beyond that green-baize door opening on the hall, past which he was wont to go on his way to bed.  To prowl through the maze of the servants’ quarters in search of it was impossible.  The only thing to be done was to go to Market Blandings and buy the things.

Fortune had helped him at the start by arranging that the Honorable Freddie, also, should be going to Market Blandings in the little runabout, which seated two.  He had acquiesced in George’s suggestion that he, George, should occupy the other seat, but with a certain lack of enthusiasm it seemed to George.  He had not volunteered any reason as to why he was going to Market Blandings in the little runabout, and on arrival there had betrayed an unmistakable desire to get rid of George at the earliest opportunity.

As this had suited George to perfection, he being desirous of getting rid of the Honorable Freddie at the earliest opportunity, he had not been inquisitive, and they had parted on the outskirts of the town without mutual confidences.

George had then proceeded to the grocer’s, and after that to another of the Market Blandings inns, not the Emsworth Arms, where he had bought the white wine.  He did not believe in the local white wine, for he was a young man with a palate and mistrusted country cellars, but he assumed that, whatever its quality, it would cheer Aline in the small hours.

He had then tramped the whole five miles back to the castle with his purchases.  It was here that his real troubles began and the quality of his love was tested.  The walk, to a heavily laden man, was bad enough; but it was as nothing compared with the ordeal of smuggling the cargo up to his bedroom.  Superhuman though he was, George was alive to the delicacy of the situation.  One cannot convey food and drink to one’s room in a strange house without, if detected, seeming to cast a slur on the table of the host.  It was as one who carries dispatches through an enemy’s lines that George took cover, emerged from cover, dodged, ducked and ran; and the moment when he sank down on his bed, the door locked behind him, was one of the happiest of his life.

The recollection of that ordeal made the one he proposed to embark on now seem slight in comparison.  All he had to do was to go to Aline’s room on the other side of the house, knock softly on the door until signs of wakefulness made themselves heard from within, and then dart away into the shadows whence he had come, and so back to bed.  He gave Aline credit for the intelligence that would enable her, on finding a tongue, some bread, a knife, a fork, salt, a corkscrew and a bottle of white wine on the mat, to know what to do with them—­and perhaps to guess whose was the loving hand that had laid them there.