loose to this girl about aching
hearts, but you want a cue for that sort of thing. And when, toddling
along, we reached the edge of the lake and she finally spoke, conceive my
chagrin when I discovered that what she was talking about was stars.

Not a bit of good to me.

"Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this
at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various
occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provencal
filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man
selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean,
and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit. "Oh,
look at that sweet little star up there all by itself."

I saw the one she meant, a little chap operating in a detached sort of
way above a spinney.

"Yes," I said.

"I wonder if it feels lonely."

"Oh, I shouldn't think so."

"A fairy must have been crying."

"Eh?"

"Don't you remember? 'Every time a fairy sheds a tear, a wee bit star is
born in the Milky Way.' Have you ever thought that, Mr. Wooster?"

I never had. Most improbable, I considered, and it didn't seem to me to
check up with her statement that the stars were God's daisy chain. I
mean, you can't have it both ways.

However, I was in no mood to dissect and criticize. I saw that I had been
wrong in supposing that the stars were not germane to the issue. Quite a
decent cue they had provided, and I leaped on it Promptly: "Talking of
shedding tears----"

But she was now on the subject of rabbits, several of which were messing
about in the park to our right.

"Oh, look. The little bunnies!"

"Talking of shedding tears----"

"Don't you love this time of the evening, Mr. Wooster, when the sun has
gone to bed and all the bunnies come out to have their little suppers?
When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if
I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen."

Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony
thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the
point.

"Talking of shedding tears," I said firmly, "it may interest you to know
that there is an aching heart in Brinkley Court."

This held her. She cheesed the rabbit theme. Her face, which had been
aglow with what I supposed was a pretty animation, clouded. She unshipped
a sigh that sounded like the wind going