Page:Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Kipling, 1899.djvu/50

36 [I wish you to see that Jenny and Me

Had barely exchanged our troth;

So a kiss or two was strictly due

By, from, and between us both.]

When Three was over, an eager lover,

I fled to the gloom outside;

And a Domino came out also

Whom I took for my future bride.

That is to say, in a casual way,

I slipped my arm around her;

With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you),

And ready to kiss I found her.

She turned her head and the name she said

Was certainly not my own;

But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek

She fled and left me alone.

Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame,

She'd doffed her domino;

And I had embraced a stranger's waist—

But I did not tell her so.