They arrived at the White Lion just before ten that night. The lights were still on in Aunt Tranter’s house; a curtain moved as they passed. Charles performed a quick toilet and leaving Sam to unpack, strode manfully up the hill. Mary was overjoyed to see him; Aunt Tranter, just behind her, was pinkly wreathed in welcoming smiles. She had had strict orders to remove herself as soon as she had greeted the traveler: there was to be no duenna nonsense that evening. Ernestina, with her customary estimation of her own dignity, had remained in the back sitting room.

She did not rise when Charles entered, but gave him a long reproachful look from under her eyelashes. He smiled.

“I forgot to buy flowers in Exeter.”

“So I see, sir.”

“I was in such haste to be here before you went to bed.”

She cast down her eyes and watched her hands, which were engaged in embroidery. Charles moved closer, and the hands rather abruptly stopped work and turned over the small article at which they were working.

“I see I have a rival.”

“You deserve to have many.”

He knelt beside her and gently raised one of her hands and kissed it. She slipped a little look at him.

“I haven’t slept a minute since you went away.”

“I can see that by your pallid cheeks and swollen eyes.”

She would not smile. “Now you make fun of me.”

“If this is what insomnia does to you I shall arrange to have an alarm bell ringing perpetually in our bedroom.”

She blushed. Charles rose and sat beside her and drew her head round and kissed her mouth and then her closed eyes, which after being thus touched opened and stared into his, every atom of dryness gone.

He smiled. “Now let me see what you are embroidering for your secret admirer.”

She held up her work. It was a watch pocket, in blue velvet—one of those little pouches Victorian gentlemen hung by their dressing tables and put their watches in at night. On the hanging flap there was embroidered a white heart with the initials C and E on either side; on the face of the pouch was begun, but not finished, a couplet in gold thread. Charles read it out loud.

“’Each time thy watch thou wind’… and how the deuce is that to finish?”

“You must guess.”

Charles stared at the blue velvet.

“Thy wife her teeth will grind’?”

She snatched it out of sight.

“Now I shan’t tell. You are no better than a cad.” A “cad” in those days meant an omnibus conductor, famous for their gift of low repartee.

“Who would never ask a fare of one so fair.”

“False flattery and feeble puns are equally detestable.”

“And you, my dearest, are adorable when you are angry.”

“Then I shall forgive you—just to be horrid.”

She turned a little away from him then, though his arm remained around her waist and the pressure of his hand on hers was returned. They remained in silence a few moments. He kissed her hand once more.

“I may walk with you tomorrow morning? And we’ll show the world what fashionable lovers we are, and look bored, and quite unmistakably a marriage of convenience?”

She smiled; then impulsively disclosed the watch pocket.

“’Each time thy watch thou wind, Of love may I thee remind.’”

“My sweetest.”

He gazed into her eyes a moment longer, then felt in his pocket and placed on her lap a small hinged box in dark-red morocco.

“Flowers of a kind.”

Shyly she pressed the little clasp back and opened the box; on a bed of crimson velvet lay an elegant Swiss brooch: a tiny oval mosaic of a spray of flowers, bordered by alternate pearls and fragments of coral set in gold. She looked dewily at Charles. He helpfully closed his eyes. She turned and leaned and planted a chaste kiss softly on his lips; then lay with her head on his shoulder, and looked again at the brooch, and kissed that.

Charles remembered the lines of that priapic song. He whispered in her ear. “I wish tomorrow were our wedding day.”

It was simple: one lived by irony and sentiment, one observed convention. What might have been was one more subject for detached and ironic observation; as was what might be. One surrendered, in other words; one learned to be what one was.

Charles pressed the girl’s arm. “Dearest, I have a small confession to make. It concerns that miserable female at Marlborough House.”

She sat up a little, pertly surprised, already amused. “Not poor Tragedy?”

He smiled. “I fear the more vulgar appellation is better suited.” He pressed her hand. “It is really most stupid and trivial. What happened was merely this. During one of my little pursuits of the elusive echinoderm…”

And so ends the story. What happened to Sarah, I do not know—whatever it was, she never troubled Charles again in person, however long she may have lingered in his memory. This is what most often happens. People sink out of sight, drown in the shadows of closer things.

Charles and Ernestina did not live happily ever after; but they lived together, though Charles finally survived her by a decade (and earnestly mourned her throughout it). They begat what shall it be—let us say seven children. Sir Robert added injury to insult by siring, and within ten months of his alliance to Mrs. Bella Tomkins, not one heir, but two. This fatal pair of twins were what finally drove Charles into business. He was bored to begin with; and then got a taste for the thing. His own sons were given no choice; and their sons today still control the great shop and all its ramifications.

Sam and Mary—but who can be bothered with the biography of servants? They married, and bred, and died, in the monotonous fashion of their kind.

Now who else? Dr. Grogan? He died in his ninety-first year. Since Aunt Tranter also lived into her nineties, we have clear proof of the amiability of the fresh Lyme air.

It cannot be all-effective, though, since Mrs. Poulteney died within two months of Charles’s last return to Lyme. Here, I am happy to say, I can summon up enough interest to look into the future—that is, into her after-life. Suitably dressed in black, she arrived in her barouche at the Heavenly Gates. Her footman—for naturally, as in ancient Egypt, her whole household had died with her—descended and gravely opened the carriage door. Mrs. Poulteney mounted the steps and after making a mental note to inform the Creator (when she knew Him better) that His domestics should be more on the alert for important callers, pulled the bellring. The butler at last appeared.

“Ma’am?”

“I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master.”

“His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma’m. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event.”

“That is most proper and kind of Him.” And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler’s head. But the man did not move aside. Instead he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.

“My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis.”

“Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma’m. And now of a much more tropical abode.”