for all that, and she asked him many questions about the little shop, 'laughing like' all the time. So he got to the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her all about Millie.
'All?' said I.
'Everything,' said Mr Skelmersdale, 'just who she was, and where she lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad to all the time, I did.'
'"Whatever you want you shall have," said the Fairy Lady. "That's as good as done. You shall feel you have the money just as you wish. And now, you know—you must kiss me."'
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 tunes. 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
