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