(Mrs Graham enters, and, finding them in each others arms, prepares to leave.)
Charlie. Clare! We want your congratulations. Dora has proposed to me, and I am to name the happy day.
Mrs Clare Graham. What! And how about her oath?
Dora (blushing). Oh, I only vowed that, however pressed to marry, I would refuse. But I was not pressed; was I, Charlie?
Charlie (sedately). Certainly not.
In the Cradle of the Deep.
"But the sweet child heart you may always keep,
For then the stars will be yours and the deep,
The boundless deep. Good night."
It had been a long engagement, commenced by him between the ages of knickerbocker and tobacco, and encouraged by her as a development of the Prince Bountiful and Cinderella romances of the schoolroom. A charming contract, drawn up without sign and seal and cemented after the manner of barbaric hordes by heterogeneous offerings precious to the engaging parties, such as guinea-pigs, bird's eggs, looted apples, and, later on, prizes in vellum, deposited with blushing triumph into the concavity of a Dolly Varden pinafore. Parents wagged their heads and forbade, but the veto was conditional; the wisdom of the serpent was allied to a certain downiness of the dove, for hints at expectations in the future of the impecunious suitor necessitated an attitude both Janus-faced and revolving. Their perspicacity was duly rewarded, for later on the vacuous pockets of the young subaltern—he had gone to thicken the "thin red line"—became plethoric with inherited revenues of a deceased uncle on the mother's side, a personage for whom malt had been the Brahma of idolatry, who had laid up for himself a tidy treasure despite the corruptions of rust and moth.