And Mr. Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her

remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve she

should be so kind. And--



The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, "Kiss

me!"



"And," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "like a fool, I did."



There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite

the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There was

something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point.

At any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently

important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right,

I have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through

which it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different

from my telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light

and the subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady

asked him more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--

a great many times. As to Millie's loveliness, I conceive him

answering that she was "all right." And then, or on some such

occasion, the Fairy Lady told him she had fallen in love with him

as he slept in the moonlight, and so he had been brought into

Fairyland, and she had thought, not knowing of Millie, that perhaps

he might chance to love her. "But now you know you can't," she said,

"so you must stop with me just a little while, and then you must

go back to Millie." She told him that, and you know Skelmersdale

was already in love with her, but the pure inertia of his mind kept

him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sort

of stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answering

about his Millie and the little shop he projected and the need

of a horse and cart. . . . And that absurd state of affairs must

have gone on for days and days. I see this little lady, hovering

about him and trying to amuse him, too dainty to understand his

complexity and too tender to let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised

as it were by his earthly position, went his way with her hither

and thither, blind to everything in Fairyland but this wonderful

intimacy that had come to him. It is hard, it is impossible, to give

in print the effect of her radiant sweetness shining through the jungle

of poor Skelmersdale's rough and broken sentences. To me, at least,

she shone clear amidst the muddle of his story like a glow-worm

in a tangle of weeds.



There must have been many days of things while all this was happening--

and once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the fairy rings

that stud the meadows near Smeeth--but at last it all came to an end.

She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by a red nightlight

sort of thing, where there were coffers piled on coffers, and cups

and golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed to all



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