"Of course it is a piece of awfully good luck for me to see active service so soon, and I should be wild with delight if it wasn't for Violet. But somehow the things you want always seem to come to you just as soon as you've left off wanting them."
"Have you spoken to Violet?" asked Isabel.
"I did not mean to. I thought it was more honourable to leave her free till I came back, and all that sort of thing. But I went to say good-bye to her to-day, and it somehow popped out without my intending it. I am afraid I was rather a selfish brute to tell her, considering how young she is; but she looked so pretty I could not help it." And Bobby tugged at his moustache regretfully.
"Don't regret it," said Isabel earnestly, "men have an idiotic notion that it is the proper thing to keep a woman in ignorance of the fact that they love her, till they are ready with the marriage-settlements; it never appears to occur to them that to her the settlements are of no importance compared with the love."
"And I'm so poor that when we get to the settlements they'll only be strait settlements," replied Bobby, with a rueful attempt to laugh.
"Never mind that. Always remember that to a man, love-making is the prologue to marriage; but to a woman, marriage is the epilogue to making-love."
"Then good-bye," whispered Lord Bobby, squeezing her hand very tight, and manfully swallowing down a silly lump that would come in his throat, "and if I am potted by the niggers, you'll comfort my little girl, won't you, and teach her to forget?"
Isabel's eyes filled with tears. "My dear boy, I cannot teach her that, for I have not learnt it myself; it is an art never mastered by women. But I will teach her that there is really no such thing as forgetfulness just as there is really no such thing as death."