FLORA then puts upon her head a fig-leaf trimmed with lace and ribbon, and gets her hoop and stick from behind the hall-door. EDWIN DROOD takes from one of his pockets an india-rubber ball, to practice fly-catches with as he walks; and driving the hoop and throwing and catching the ball, the two go down the ancient turnpike of Bumsteadville together.
"Oh, please, EDDY, scrape yourself close to the fences, so that the girls can't see you out of the windows," pleads FLORA. "It's so utterly absurd to be walking with one that one's got to marry whether one likes it or not; and you do look so perfectly ridiculous in that short coat, and all your other things so tight."
He gloomily scrapes against the fences, dropping his ball and catching it on the rebound at every step. "Which way shall we go?" "Up by the store, EDDY, dear."
They go to the all-sorts country store in question, where EDWIN DROOD buys her some sassafras bull's-eye candy, and then they turn toward home again.
"Now be a good-tempered EDDY," she says, trundling her hoop beside him, "and pretend that you aren't going to be my husband." "Not if I can help it," he says, catching the ball almost spitefully. "Then you're going to have somebody else?" "You make my head ache, so you do," whispers EDWIN DROOD. "I don't want to marry anybody at all!"
She tickles him under the arm with her hoop-stick, and turns eyes that are all serious upon his. "I wish, EDDY, that we could be perfectly absurd friends to each other, instead of utterly ridiculous engaged people. It's exquisitely awful, you know, to have a husband picked out for you by dead folks, and I'm so sick about it sometimes that I hardly have the heart to fix my back-hair. Let each of us forbear, and stop teasing the other."
Greatly pleased by this perfectly intelligent and forgiving arrangement, EDWIN DROOD says: "You're right, FLORA, Teasing is played out;" and drives his ball into a perfect frenzy of bounces.
They have arrived near the Ritualistic church, through the windows of which come the organ-notes of one practising within. Something familiar in the grand air rolling out to them causes EDWIN DROOD to repeat, abstractedly, "I feel—I feel—I feel—-"
FLORA, simultaneously affected in the same way, unconsciously murmurs,—-"I feel like a morning star."
They then join hands, under the same irresistible spell, and take dancing steps, humming, in unison, "Shoo, fly! don't bodder me."