"Now be a good-tempered EDDY," she says, trundling her hoop beside him,
"and pretend that you aren't going to be my husband." "Not if I can help
it," he says, catching the ball almost spitefully. "Then you're going to
have somebody else?" "You make my head ache, so you do," whispers EDWIN
DROOD. "I don't want to marry anybody at all!"

She tickles him under the arm with her hoop-stick, and turns eyes that
are all serious upon his. "I wish, EDDY, that we could be perfectly
absurd friends to each other, instead of utterly ridiculous engaged
people. It's exquisitely awful, you know, to have a husband picked out
for you by dead folks, and I'm so sick about it sometimes that I hardly
have the heart to fix my back-hair. Let each of us forbear, and stop
teasing the other."

Greatly pleased by this perfectly intelligent and forgiving arrangement,
EDWIN DROOD says: "You're right, FLORA, Teasing is played out;" and
drives his ball into a perfect frenzy of bounces.

They have arrived near the Ritualistic church, through the windows of
which come the organ-notes of one practising within. Something familiar
in the grand air rolling out to them causes EDWIN DROOD to repeat,
abstractedly, "I feel--I feel--I feel---"

FLORA, simultaneously affected in the same way, unconsciously
murmurs,---"I feel like a morning star."

They then join hands, under the same irresistible spell, and take
dancing steps, humming, in unison, "Shoo, fly! don't bodder me."