t an officer?"

"I don't know," I said, evading a shameful difficulty.

"I'd rather go into the navy."

"Wouldn't you like to fight?"

"I'd like to fight," I said. "But a common soldier it's no honour to
have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon while you do it, and
how could I be an officer?"

"Couldn't you be?" she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the spaces
of the social system opened between us.

Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and lie
my way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and poor men went
into the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no army officer did; and
I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my outlook
upon blue water. "He loved Lady Hamilton," I said, "although she was a
lady--and I will love you."

We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became audible,
calling "Beeee-atrice! Beeee-e-atrice!"

"Snifty beast!" said my lady, and tried to get on with the conversation;
but that governess made things impossible.

"Come here!" said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand; and I
went very close to her, and she put her little head down upon the wall
until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.

"You are my humble, faithful lover," she demanded in a whisper, her warm
flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark and lustrous.

"I am your humble, faithful lover," I whispered back.

And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed,
and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two kissed for the first
time.

"Beeee-e-e-a-trice!" fearfully close.

My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg. A
moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess,
and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity and
disingenuousness.

I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished
guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreams
and single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken
valleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days that
kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.

Then I remember an expedition we made--she, I, and her
half-brother--into those West Woods--they two were supposed to be
playing in the shrubbery--and how we were Indians there, and made a
wigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept nea