On such a night
  Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
  Upon the wild sea-banks and waft her lover
  To come again to Carthage.”

They had both stopped, and Jean, after a glance at her companion’s face, edged away.  He caught her hands and held her there in the shadow.

“The last time we were together, Jean, it was December, dripping rain and mud, and you would have none of me.  To-night—­in such a night, Jean, I come again to you.  I love you.  Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” said Jean—­“for I am yours.”

For a moment they stood caught up to the seventh heaven, knowing nothing except that they were together, hearing nothing but the beating of their own hearts.

Jean was the first to come to herself.

“Everyone’s gone home.  The boys’ll think we are lost....  Oh, Biddy, have I done right?  Are you sure you want me?  Can I make you happy?”

“Can you make me happy?  My blessed child, what a question!  Don’t you know that you seem to me almost too dear for my possessing?  You are far too good for me, but I won’t give you up now.  No, not though all the King’s horses and all the King’s men come in array against me.  My Jean ... my little Jean.”

Jock’s comment on hearing of his sister’s engagement was that he did think Richard Plantagenet was above that sort of thing.  Later on, when he had got more used to the idea, he said that, seeing he had to marry somebody, it was better to be Jean than anybody else.

Mhor, like Gallio, cared for none of these things.

He merely said, “Oh, and will you be married and have a bridescake?  What fun!...  You might go with Peter and me to the station and see the London trains pass.  Jock went yesterday and he says he won’t go again for three days.  Will you, Jean?  Oh, please—­”

David, at Oxford, sent his sister a letter which she put away among her chiefest treasures.  Safely in his room, with a pen in his hand, he would write what he was too shy and awkward to say:  he could call down blessings on his sister in a letter, when face to face with her he would have been dumb.

Pamela, on hearing the news, rushed down from London to congratulate Jean and her Biddy in person.  She was looking what Jean called “fearfully London,” and seemed in high spirits.

“Of course I’m in high spirits,” she told Jean.  “The very nicest thing in the world has come to pass.  I didn’t think there was a girl living that I could give Biddy to without a grudge till I saw you, and then it seemed much too good to be true that you should fall in love with each other.”

“But,” said Jean, “how could you want him to marry me, an ordinary girl in a little provincial town?—­he could have married anybody.”

“Lots of girls would have married Biddy, but I wanted him to have the best, and when I found it for him he had the sense to recognise it.  Well, it’s all rather like a fairy-tale.  And I have Lewis!  Jean, you can’t think how different life in London seems now—­I can enjoy it whole-heartedly, fling myself into it in a way I never could before, not even when I was at my most butterfly stage, because now it isn’t my life, it doesn’t really matter, I’m only a stranger within the gates.  My real life is Lewis, and the thought of the green glen and the little town beside the Tweed.”