“Look here,” he said, leaning towards her, “there’s not a soul about; they’re in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once—it can’t matter to you—and it will mean so very much to me.”
“That’s just it,” she said; “if it didn’t mean——”
“Then it shan’t mean anything but good-bye. It’s only about eight years since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion.”
She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she looked at him.
“Very well,” she said suddenly.
“No,” he said; “I won’t have it unless it does mean something.”
There was a silence. “Our dance, I think?” said the voice of one bending before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom she had been hiding.
Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed more than once. “I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,” she said; “and I wish—yes, I do wish he had. I don’t suppose he’ll care a bit for me when I come back.”
So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father’s park from her father’s rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday had seen his own jovial return.
“Do you all the good in the world, my boy. ’Pon my soul, you have a tired sort of look, as if you’d got some of these jolly new diseases people have taken to dying of lately—appendi-what’s-its-name, you know, and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So long! You take my tip.”