chapter and think about it.



EIGHT

The Fore-ordained Attachment of Zena Pepperleigh and Peter Pupkin

Zena Pepperleigh used to sit reading novels on the piazza of the
judge's house, half hidden by the Virginia creepers. At times the
book would fall upon her lap and there was such a look of unstilled
yearning in her violet eyes that it did not entirely disappear even
when she picked up the apple that lay beside her and took another
bite out of it.

With hands clasped she would sit there dreaming all the beautiful
day-dreams of girlhood. When you saw that faraway look in her eyes,
it meant that she was dreaming that a plumed and armoured knight was
rescuing her from the embattled keep of a castle beside the Danube.
At other times she was being borne away by an Algerian corsair over
the blue waters of the Mediterranean and was reaching out her arms
towards France to say farewell to it.

Sometimes when you noticed a sweet look of resignation that seemed to
rest upon her features, it meant that Lord Ronald de Chevereux was
kneeling at her feet, and that she was telling him to rise, that her
humbler birth must ever be a bar to their happiness, and Lord Ronald
was getting into an awful state about it, as English peers do at the
least suggestion of anything of the sort.