"Was it Sydney Smith who gave his friends forty recipes for happiness? I remember three of them," she counted on her fingers, "a bright fire, a kettle singing on the hob, a bag of lollipops on the mantelshelf--all easy to come at. I can't believe that I shall be left entirely alone--I should be so scared o' nights. Surely someone will like me well enough to live with me--perhaps Buff, if he continues to have the contempt for females that he now has; but anyway I shall hold on to the bright fire and the singing kettle and the bag of lollipops." She sat for a moment, absent-eyed, as if she were looking down the years; then she laughed. "But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said. Arthur laughed with her, and said: "Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy." "I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood." Arthur shook his head at her. "In your father's words, you are an absurd creature. Sing to me, won't you? seeing it's my last night." "Yes." She went to the piano. "What shall I sing? 'A love-song or a song of good life'?" "A love-song," said Arthur, and finished the quotation. "'I care not for good life.'" Elizabeth giggled. "Our language is incorrigibly noble. You know how it is when you go to the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford? I come away so filled with majestic words that I can hardly resist greeting our homely chemist with 'Ho! apothecary!' But I'm not going to sing of love. 'I'm no' heedin' for't,' as Marget says.... This is a little song out of a fairy tale--a sort of good-bye song: 'If fairy songs and fairy gold Were tunes to sell and gold to spend, Then, hearts so gay and hearts so bold, We'd find the joy that has no end. But fairy songs and fairy gold Are but red leaves in Autumn's play. The pipes are dumb, the tale is told, Go back to realms of working day. The working day is dark and long, And very full of dismal things; It has no tunes like fairy song, No hearts so brave as fairy kings. Its princes are the dull and old, Its birds are mute, its skies are grey; And quicker far than fairy gold Its dreary treasures fleet away. But all the gallant, kind and true May haply hear the fairy drum, Which still must beat the wide world through, Till Arthur wake and Charlie come. And those who hear and know the call Will take the road with staff in hand, And after many a fight and fall, Come home at last to fairy-land.'" * * * * * They were half-way through breakfast next morning before Buff appeared. He stood at the door with a sheet of paper in his hand, looking rather distraught. His hair had certainly not been brushed, and a smear of paint disfigured one side of his face. He was not, as Mr. Taylor would have put it, looking his "brightest and bonniest."