ned and rolled up the sleeve
of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes.
"Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw
inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess--"

"Amanda!"

"Well." She wrinkled her brows.

He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and
there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.

"Look here, Amanda!" he said, "if you think that you are going to
make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of
complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of
social assertion--by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!"

Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.

"This, Cheetah, is the morning mood," she remarked.

"This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda--"

He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked. The
magic word "Breakfast" came simultaneously from them.

"Eggs," she said ravenously, and led the way.

A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce
between them.

3

Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since
that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and
variety. Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in the
marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only one
untoward event. The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the earnest
advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had
suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and fled with
a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an uproar of inadequately smothered
sorrow came as an obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages
of the service. Amanda appeared unaware of the incident at the time,
but afterwards she explained things to Benham. "Curates," she said, "are
such pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he
never had anything to go upon at all--not anything--except his own
imaginations."

"I suppose when you met him you were nice to him."

"I was nice to him, of course...."

They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of
this infatuated divine. His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and
then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and
their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely
and transitorily did they ever think of