"I've had enough of your silly game," she said, her eyes very bright. "But, O Lord! I feel better!"
From the furious excitement which had possessed them, neither knowing why, they passed to deep contentment and became carefully decorous. They got the cigarettes, the tobacconist explaining as 'ow he had stopped there after hours, and Rampole gratified a long-cherished wish to buy a church-warden pipe. He was intrigued by the chemist's shop; with its large glass vats of red and green and its impressive array of drugs, it was like something out of a mediaeval tale. There was an inn, called The Friar Tuck, and a public-house called The Goat and Bunch of Grapes. Rampole was steered away from the latter only by the girl's (to him) inexplicable refusal to accompany him into the bar. All.in all, he was much impressed.
"You can get a shave and a hair-cut in the cigar store," he continued to muse. "It isn't so different from America, after all."
He felt so fine that even the trials were nothing. They ran into Mrs. Theodosia Payne, the lawyer's wife, who was stalking grimly along the High Street with her ouija board under her arm. Mrs. Payne had a formidable hat. She moved her jaws like a ventriloquist's dummy, but spoke like a sergeant-major. Nevertheless, Rampole listened with Chesterfieldian politeness while she explained the vagaries of Lucius, her "control" — apparently an erratic and dissipated member of the spirit world, who skidded all over the board and spelled with a strong cockney accent. Dorothy saw her companion's face looking dangerously apoplectic, and got him away from Mrs. Payne before they both exploded into mirth.
It was nearly eight o'clock before they started back. Everything pleased these two, from the street lamps (which resembled glass coffins, and burnt a very consumptive sort of gas) to a tiny shop with a bell over the door, where you could get gilt-covered gingerbread animals and sheets of long-forgotten comic-songs. Rampole had always had a passion for buying useless junk, on the two sound principles that he didn't need it and that he had money to spend; so, finding a kindred spirit who didn't think it was childish, he indulged. They went back through a luminous dusk, the song-sheets held between them like a hymnal, earnestly singing a lament called, "Where Was You, ‘Arry, on the Last Bank 'Oliday?" — and Dorothy was sternly ordered to repress her hilarity in the pathetic parts.
"It's been glorious," the girl said when they had almost reached the lane leading to Dr. Fell's. "It never occurred to me that there was anything interesting in Chatterham. I'm sorry to go home."
"It never occurred to me, either," he said, blankly. "It just seemed that way this afternoon."
They meditated this a moment, looking at each other.
"We've got time for one more," he suggested, as though that were the most important thing in the world. "Do you want to try `The Rose of Bloomsbury Square'?"
"Oh no! Dr. Fell's an old dear, but I've got to preserve some dignity. I saw Mrs. Colonel Granby peeping through the curtains all the time we were in the village. Besides, it's' getting late…."