"But think of the romance of the meeting," I urged. "Just fancy! It is to be at the cross-roads, perhaps above the nameless grave of a suicide. There I shall be waiting at five o'clock, all dressed up in my mustard suit and tremulous with excitement. And at last there will dash up to the trysting-place some splendid equipage, a silver-plated car, or the family coach with prancing and foaming horses. And there, at the cross-roads, we shall have our little discussion; no speech-making, all quite informal. Oh, I wish it could have been moonlight!"
The Vicar's wife began to look quite scared.
"Are you going mad?" she asked.
"I think so," I said. "Do you know," I went on wildly, saying just anything by way of preserving my sanity, "I remember that once, when I was quite little, I half promised I would marry this highly exalted person; we were playing together as boy and girl in a garden."
"But the Countess of Aire," cried the Vicar's wife, "never was a girl."
"And never was a boy either," I cried.
"The Countess of Aire," screamed the Vicar's wife—yes, she was fairly screaming by now—"is a he."
"Now that is absurd," I said.
It was the Vicar, coming round the corner in his usual hurry, as if every day were a Sunday, who saved the situation by bumping into us both.
"The Countess of Aire," shrieked his poor wife, frantically clutching him by the coat-tails, "is a man, isn't he?"