"I don't mean to be," said Mabel briskly. "I'd rather marry a travelling tinker."
"It would be rather nice," Kathleen mused, "to marry the Gypsy King and go about in a caravan telling fortunes and hung round with baskets and brooms."
"Oh, if I could choose," said Mabel, "of course I'd marry a brigand, and live in his mountain fastnesses, and be kind to his captives and help them to escape and ,"
"You'll be a real treasure to your husband," said Gerald.
"Yes," said Kathleen, "or a sailor would be nice. You'd watch for his ship coming home and set the lamp in the dormer window to light him home through the storm; and when he was drowned at sea you d be most frightfully sorry, and go every day to lay flowers on his daisied grave."
"Yes," Mabel hastened to say, "or a soldier, and then you'd go to the wars with short petticoats and a cocked hat and a barrel round your neck like a St. Bernard dog. There's a picture of a soldier's wife on a song auntie's got. It's called 'The Veevandyear'."
"When I marry " Kathleen quickly said.
"When I marry," said Gerald, "I'll marry a dumb girl, or else get the ring to make her so that she can't speak unless she's spoken to. Let's have a squint.
He applied his eye to the stone lattice.
"They're moving off," he said. "Those pink and purple hats are nodding off in the distant prospect; and the funny little man with the beard like a goat is going a different way from everyone else the gardeners will have to head him off. I don't see Mademoiselle, though. The rest of you had better bunk. It doesn't do to run any risks with picnics. The deserted hero of our tale, alone and unsupported, urged on his brave followers to pursue the commissariat waggons, he himself remaining at the post of danger and difficulty, because he was born to stand on burning decks whence all but he had fled, and to lead forlorn hopes when despaired of by the human race!"