As we lay, a cicada set up its shrilling quite close to us.  I slipped my head from Carlotta’s lap and idly parted the rank grass in search of the noisy intruder, and by good luck I found him.  I beckoned Carlotta, who glided down, and there, with our heads together and holding our breath, we watched the queerest little love drama imaginable.  Our cicada stood alert and spruce, waving his antenna with a sort of cavalier swagger, and every now and then making his corslet vibrate passionately.  On the top of a blade of grass sat a brown little Juliet—­a most reserved, discreet little Juliet, but evidently much interested in Romeo’s serenade.  When he sang she put her head to one side and moved as if uncertain whether to descend from her balcony.  When he stopped, which he did at frequent intervals, being as it were timorous and tongue-tied, she took her foot from the ladder and waited, at first patiently and then with an obvious air of boredom.  Messer Romeo made a hop forward and vibrated; Juliet grew tremulous.  Alarmed at his boldness he halted and made a hop back; Juliet looked disappointed.  At last another cicada set up a louder note some yards away and, without a nod or a sign, Juliet skipped off into space, leaving the most disconsolate little Romeo of a grasshopper you ever beheld.  He gave vent to a dismal failure of a vibration and hopped to the foot of the faithless lady’s bower.

Carlotta broke into a merry laugh and clapped her hands.

“I am so glad.”

“She is the most graceless hussy imaginable,” I cried.  “There was he grinding his heart out for her, and just because a more brazen-throated scoundrel came upon the scene she must needs leave our poor friend in the lurch.  She has no more heart than my boot, and she will come to a bad end.”

“But he was such a fool,” retorted my sage damsel, with a flash of laughter in her dark eyes.  “If he wanted her, why didn’t he go up and take her?”

“Because he is a gentleman, a cicada of fine and delicate feeling.”

“Hou!” laughed Carlotta.  “He was a fool.  It served him right.  She grew tired of waiting.”

“You believe, then,” said I, “in marriage by capture?”

I explained and discoursed to her of the matrimonial habits of the Tartar tribes.

“Yes,” said Carlotta.  “That is sense.  And it must be such fun for the girl.  All that, what you call it?—­wooing?—­is waste of time.  I like things to happen, quick, quick, one after the other—­or else—­”

“Or else what?”

“To do nothing, nothing but lie in the sun, like this afternoon.”

“Yes,” said I dreamily, after I had again thrown myself by her side.  “Like this afternoon.”

I sit at my window and look out upon the strip of beach, the hauled-up fishing boats and the nets hung out to dry looming vague in the starlight, and I hear the surf’s rhythmical moan a few yards beyond; and it beats into my ears the idiot phrase that has recurred all the evening.