Consider his position, you faint-hearted and self-pitying young men who think you have a tough row to hoe just because, when you pay your evening visit with the pound box of candy under your arm, you see the handsome sophomore from Yale sitting beside her on the porch, playing the ukulele.  If ever the world has turned black to you in such a situation and the moon gone in behind a cloud, think of George Bevan and what he was up against.  You are at least on the spot.  You can at least put up a fight.  If there are ukuleles in the world, there are also guitars, and tomorrow it may be you and not he who sits on the moonlit porch; it may be he and not you who arrives late.  Who knows?  Tomorrow he may not show up till you have finished the Bedouin’s Love Song and are annoying the local birds, roosting in the trees, with Poor Butterfly.

What I mean to say is, you are on the map.  You have a sporting chance.  Whereas George...  Well, just go over to England and try wooing an earl’s daughter whom you have only met once—­and then without an introduction; whose brother’s hat you have smashed beyond repair; whose family wishes her to marry some other man:  who wants to marry some other man herself—­and not the same other man, but another other man; who is closely immured in a mediaeval castle . . .  Well, all I say is—­try it.  And then go back to your porch with a chastened spirit and admit that you might be a whole lot worse off.

George, as I say, had not envisaged the peculiar difficulties of his position.  Nor did he until the evening of his second day at the Marshmoreton Arms.  Until then, as I have indicated, he roamed in a golden mist of dreamy meditation among the soothing by-ways of the village of Belpher.  But after lunch on the second day it came upon him that all this sort of thing was pleasant but not practical.  Action was what was needed.  Action.

The first, the obvious move was to locate the castle.  Inquiries at the Marshmoreton Arms elicited the fact that it was “a step” up the road that ran past the front door of the inn.  But this wasn’t the day of the week when the general public was admitted.  The sightseer could invade Belpher Castle on Thursdays only, between the hours of two and four.  On other days of the week all he could do was to stand like Moses on Pisgah and take in the general effect from a distance.  As this was all that George had hoped to be able to do, he set forth.

It speedily became evident to George that “a step” was a euphemism.  Five miles did he tramp before, trudging wearily up a winding lane, he came out on a breeze-swept hill-top, and saw below him, nestling in its trees, what was now for him the centre of the world.  He sat on a stone wail and lit a pipe.  Belpher Castle.  Maud’s home.  There it was.  And now what?