to the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her all
about Millie.

"All?" said I.

"Everything," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "just who she was, and where she
lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad to all the time, I
did."

"'Whatever you want you shall have,' said the Fairy Lady. 'That's as
good as done. You SHALL feel you have the money just as you wish. And
now, you know--YOU MUST KISS ME.'"

And Mr. Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her
remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve she
should be so kind. And--

The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, "Kiss
me!"

"And," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "like a fool, I did."

There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite
the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There was
something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point.
At any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently
important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right, I
have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through which
it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different from my
telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light and the
subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady asked him
more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--a great many
times. As to Millie's loveliness, I conceive him answering that she was
"all right." And then, or on some such occasion, the Fairy Lady told him
she had fallen in love with him as he slept in the moonlight, and so
he had been brought into Fairyland, and she had thought, not knowing of
Millie, that perhaps he might chance to love her. "But now you know you
can't," she said, "so you must stop with me just a little while, and
then you must go back to Millie." She told him that, and you know
Skelmersdale was already in love with her, but the pure inertia of his
mind kept him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sort
of stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answering
about his Millie and the little shop he projected and the need of a
horse and cart.... And that absurd state of affairs must have gone on
for days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him and trying
to amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and too tender
to let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by h