"Then came the customary Orlando--oh, well! Alfred, if you like. The name isn't altogether inappropriate, for he does encounter existence with much the same abandon which I have previously noticed in a muffin. For the rest, he was a nicely washed fellow, with a sufficiency of the mediaeval equivalents for bonds and rubber-tired buggies and country places. Oh, yes! I forgot to say that the man was poor,--also that the girl had a great deal of common-sense and no less than three longheaded aunts. And so the girl talked to the man in a common-sense fashion--and after that she was never at home." "Never?" said Rosalind. "Only that time they talked about the weather," said I. "So the man fell out of bed just about then, and woke up and came to his sober senses." "He did it very easily," said Rosalind, almost as if in resentment. "The novelty of the process attracted him," I pleaded. "So he said--in a perfectly sensible way--that he had known all along it was only a game they were playing,--a game in which there were no stakes. That was a lie. He had put his whole soul into the game, playing as he knew for his life's happiness; and the verses, had they been worthy of the love which caused them to be written, would have been among the great songs of the world. But while the man knew at last that he had been a fool, he was swayed by a man-like reluctance against admitting it. So he laughed--and lied--and broke away, hurt, but still laughing." "You hadn't mentioned any verses before," said Rosalind. "I told you he was a fool," said I. "And, after all, that is the entire story." Then I spent several minutes in wondering what would happen next. During this time I lost none of my interest in the sky. I believed everything I had said: my emotions would have done credit to a Romeo or an Amadis. "The first time that the girl was not at home," Rosalind observed, impersonally, "the man had on a tan coat and a brown derby. He put on his gloves as he walked down the street. His shoulders were the most indignant--and hurt things she had ever seen. Then the girl wrote to him,--a strangely sincere letter,--and tore it up." "Historical research," I murmured, "surely affords no warrant for such attire among the rural denizens of tranquil Arden." "You see," continued Rosalind, oblivious to interruption, "I know all about the girl,--which is more than you do." "That," I conceded, "is disastrously probable."