"Somewhere--impressively,--people are saying Intelligent things (which their grandmothers said), While I loiter, and dream to the branches swaying In furtive conference, high overhead."
"Verses!" The Earl snorted. "At your age!"
"Here the hand of April, unwashed from slaying Earth's fallen tyrant--for Winter is dead,-- Uncloses anemones, staining them red: And her daffodils guard me in squads,--displaying Intrepid lances lest wisdom tread Where I loiter and dream to the branches' swaying--
"Well, Harry, and to-day I cannot do so any longer. That is what I most miss,--the ability to lie a-sprawl in the spring grass and dream out an uncharted world,--a dream so vivid that, beside it, reality grew tenuous, and the actual world became one of childhood's shrug-provoking bugbears dimly remembered."
"I do not understand poetry," the Earl apologetically observed. "It appears to me unreasonable to advance a statement simply because it happens to rhyme with a statement you have previously made. And that is what all you poets do. Why, this is very remarkable," said Lord Brudenel, with a change of tone; "yonder is young Humphrey Degge with Marian. I had thought him in bed at Tunbridge. Did I not hear something of an affair with a house-breaker--?"
Then the Earl gave an exclamation, for in full view of them Lord Humphrey Degge was kissing Lord Brudenel's daughter.
"Oh, the devil!" said the Earl. "Oh, the insolent young ape!"
"Nay," said the Duke, restraining him; "not particularly insolent, Harry. If you will observe more closely you will see that Marian does not exactly object to his caresses--quite the contrary, I would say, I told you that you should not permit Spring about the premises."
The Earl wheeled in an extreme of astonishment. "Come, come, sir! she is your betrothed wife! Do you not intend to kill the fellow?"
"My faith, why?" said his Grace of Ormskirk, with a shrug. "As for betrothals, do you not see that she is already very happily paired?"
In answer Brudenel raised his hands toward heaven, in just the contention of despair and rage appropriate to parental affection when an excellent match is imperilled by a chit's idiocy.
Marian and Lord Humphrey Degge were mounting from the scrap of forest that juts from Pevis Hill, like a spur from a man's heel, between Agard Court and Halvergate. Their progress was not conspicuous for celerity. Now they had attained to the tiny, elm-shadowed plateau beyond the yew-hedge, and there Marian paused. Two daffodils had fallen from the great green-and-yellow cluster in her left hand. Humphrey Degge lifted them, and then raised to his mouth the slender fingers that reached toward the flowers. The man's pallor, you would have said, was not altogether due to his recent wound.
