She feels as if some one--surely it cannot be the gentle friend made up of sense, sympathy, and _esprit_?--has given her a blow on the head with a cudgel. She has always known that she is to marry Rupert. The idea is perfectly familiar, and not the least unwelcome. To be his wife in the future is as inevitable a part of the scheme of life as to die. Up to five minutes ago, the one has appeared as vague and distant as the other. But to be married to him _soon_! To be married to him soon because the Campion family cannot be allowed to die out! It is by her union with him that it is to be preserved! It is her child, hers and Rupert’s, who is to hand on the honoured name! Her very ears tingle and glow at the unfamiliar realism and animalism of the idea. It is only such a dotting of the _i_’s and crossing of the _t_’s that could make her realize what a nebulous thing, with no foothold in the world of reality, her engagement to her cousin has hitherto been. To be married to Rupert! That she should have a child, and that it should be Rupert’s! Her feelings are as yet much too chaotic for her to know whether the prodigious fact thrown by the magic-lantern of Mrs. Darcy’s simple question upon the sheet of her imagination, belongs to the region of pleasure or pain. She knows only that she feels extraordinarily odd. The sight--normal and familiar as it is--of the person who has just been thrust upon her in so glaringly new a character, the sight of him standing, as he has stood many hundreds of times before, watching for her back-coming from the verandah, matter-of-fact and every-day as he looks, does not in the least lessen the queerness of her sensations. “The Rectory, of course?” he says, with a sort of whimsical protest in his tone and eyebrows. Then, in an altered key of disturbed curiosity, “Why, what have they been doing to you? You look---- I declare I do not know what you look like.” “Do not look at me, then,” says she, trying to pass him with a brusque half-laugh; and, for the first time in her life, feeling uncomfortable beneath the scrutiny of his surprised eyes. But he catches her before she can escape. “What _have_ they been doing to you?” “They have been telling me that Colonel Baden-Powell has begun to lay,” replies she, deceitfully. The confusion of sexes prevalent among the Darcy poultry is too familiar to the young man to raise a smile. He looses his detaining hold on his cousin’s sleeve, and there is an accent of resigned distaste in his next words. “Of course yesterday’s news has brought on a frightful access of khaki? I saw the flames of their bonfire insulting the evening sky last night.” “We ought to have had one too,” she retorts, with a sudden rush of opposition. “Have we so much cause to rejoice?” he asks; and there is such unaffected feeling in his voice that her heart smites her. The recent emotion and the present one mix and produce her next sentence. “You are the only one left now?”