“You can’t marry her, Joe.”

Joe Blossom raised his shears and clipped a protruding branch. The point under discussion seemed to have ceased to interest him.

“Who wants to?” he said. “Good riddance!”

They went down the lane. Silence still brooded over them. The words she wanted continued to evade her.

They came to a grassy bank. Tom sat down. He was feeling unutterably tired.

“Tom!”

He looked up. His mind was working dizzily.

“You’re going to marry me,” he muttered.

She sat down beside him.

“I know,” she said. “Tom, dear, lay your head on my lap and go to sleep.”

If this story proves anything (beyond the advantage of being in good training when you fight), it proves that you cannot get away from the moving pictures even in a place like Millbourne; for as Sally sat there, nursing Tom, it suddenly struck her that this was the very situation with which that “Romance of the Middle Ages” film ended. You know the one I mean. Sir Percival Ye Something (which has slipped my memory for the moment) goes out after the Holy Grail; meets damsel in distress; overcomes her persecutors; rescues her? gets wounded, and is nursed back to life in her arms. Sally had seen it a dozen times. And every time she had reflected that the days of romance are dead, and that that sort of thing can’t happen nowadays.