as many
puffs, intoxicated, doubtless, with delight and drunk with ecstasy.
The fourth one he missed. The fifth moved as he was shooting and he
missed again. Then he got nervous and tried to please two at once.
The sixth began to buzz and four more arrived.

Berry lost his head and began to shoot wildly. One settled on Daphne's
veil and she screamed. The hive began to hum again. With mistaken
gallantry, Berry left the bees on his gauntlet and turned to the one on
his wife's veil. The next moment she was reeling against the wall in a
paroxysm of choking coughs. Some more of the twenty-five thousand
began to emerge from the skep, and a moment later I was stung in the
lobe of the right ear.

The pain, I may say, was acute, but it certainly broke the spell, and I
turned and ran as I have never run before.

Across the garden, down the drive, out of the lodge gates, over a
hedge, with eighteen inches to spare, and across country like a
thoroughbred.

At last I plunged into a roadside wood almost on the top of a girl.
She stared at me.

"Lie down," I gasped.

"Why?"

"Never mind why. Lie down for your life."

She lay down wonderingly beside me, as I sobbed and panted in the
undergrowth.

At last, after cautioning her to keep quiet, I listened long and
carefully. The result was satisfactory. My escape was complete.

I turned my attention to the girl. She was sitting up now regarding me
with big eyes.

Her hair was almost hidden under a big-brimmed garden hat, but I could
see her face properly. Her features were delicate and regular, and her
mouth was small and red. Steady grey eyes. She was wearing a soft
blue dress of linen, and her brown arms were bare to the elbow. In her
hand she had a posy of wild flowers. Little shoes of blue, untanned
leather, I think it is. She was slender and lithe to look at, and the
flush of health glowed in her cheeks.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It all comes of beeing. If we hadn't been
beeing--"

"And yet he doesn't look mad," she said musingly.

"I'm not mad," I said. "I admit that if I had on a bonnet, I should
have several bees in it. Happily I lost it at the water jump. I'm a
beer."

"A what?" she said, recoiling.

"A beer. At least I was one. Two other beers were with me--busy
beers. Stay," I went on, "be of good beer--I mean cheer. I do not
refer to the beverage of that name. By 'beer' I mean one actively
interested in bees."

She looked more