Every day for eight whole weeks I have been out, riding or walking in the Hickley woods, sometimes with father, many times alone with Michael. I love this man I’m going to marry very deeply, but I wouldn’t let him know it. He dislikes ’the truest form of kindness’ even more than all my other male things do! Sometimes after a day of delight together he says as he goes home,— ’I’ve hardly seen you, darling.’ ’Why, I’ve let you stay _all_ day,’ I say reproachfully. ’Yes, but I haven’t really had you; you’ve eluded me. You drive me mad, Meg, with your little air of cool aloofness.’ But what would he? Is a woman to be done out of her wooing because a man chose once to be a caveman and talked of things belonging to him, before he’d even got them? So naturally I tilt my chin a little when he talks like that, and hold out my hand to say good-night, and watch out of the tail of my eye to see how he is liking it! But sometimes it’s——’ ’No, I won’t stand _any_ more of it to-night.’ and then follows that mastering kiss which makes me really his for just that moment, and sends my thoughts and feelings whirling so that I try the harder to elude him afterwards! One day this week I felt unusually romantic, so I read the Sonnets from the Portuguese. ’Oh, beautiful, Elizabeth,’ I said, ’but simple, when you come to think of it. I’m sure that I could write one just as good, and I love my man every bit as much as you did Robert.’ So here is my Maiden Effort and probably my Swan Song:— ’At night I think of you, beloved. Dream that I see your face, Fancy I feel you kiss me As I rest in your embrace. But at the rose glow of morning You fade like a summer mist, And I wake, and long For a dream that has gone, For a face that I fancied I kissed.’ Of course it is not strictly accurate, for I never have the luck to dream of Michael, ’but a _Poet_,’ I observed as I wrote the last lines down, ’is not expected to be verbally truthful in a _Poem_.’ ’What, still slinging ink, little ’un?’ said father, coming into my room at this point, ’why, you’ve got a blob on your neck!’ And then he picked up this chapter in that impertinent way he has and read it, with his eyes all curled up at the corners. ’Might one criticise the poem, Meg?’ he asked diffidently. ’Oh, do,’ I replied, conscious that it was beyond all criticism. ’Your "poem,"’ he said, getting the word out with difficulty, ’has defective rhymes, darling. "Long" does not rhyme with "gone," nor is the—um—"poem" a sonnet.’ ’But I never said it was, daddy.’ ’No, Meg?’ ’Oh, father,’ I said, shaking his arm, ’it would look deliriously beautiful printed on good paper with wide margins and rough edges?’ Nannie said, ’You give it to Master Michael, dearie. He’ll like it, and as to rhymes, why the stuff your father reads never has any.’ So I presented it to Michael, and I had no illusions then as to whether I were kissed or not.