that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown
into a _very_ old fogy."

"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer
pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though
weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with
the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's.

"Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the
subject had never struck him in that light before. "Poor fellow! I am
sorry if it is so. Ah, you see"--with a smile--"he has _six_ more
reasons for wrinkles than I have."

"You mean us, I suppose," I answer matter-of-factly. "As to that, I
think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his."
Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness,
"You have never been married, I suppose?"

He half turns away his head.

"No--not yet! I have not yet had that good fortune."

I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial. Surely, surely he might
say in the words of Lancelot:

"Had I chosen to wed,
I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine."

"And you?" he asks, turning with an accent of playfulness toward me.

"Not yet," I answer, laughing, "and most likely I shall have to answer
'not yet' to that question as often as it is put to me till the end of
the chapter."

"Why so?"

I shrug my shoulders.

"In moments of depression it strikes Barbara and me, that me and Tou Tou
shall end by being three old cats together."

"Are you so anxious to be married?" he asks with an air of wonder, "in
such a hurry to leave so happy a home?"

"Every one knows best where his own shoe pinches," I answer
vernacularly. "I am afraid that it does not sound very lady-like, but
since you ask me the question, I _am_ rather anxious. Barbara is not:
_I_ am."

A shade of I cannot exactly say what emotion--it _looks_ like
disappointment, but surely it cannot be that--passes across the sunshine
of his face.

"All my plans hinge on my marrying," I continue, feeling drawn, I do not
know how or why, into confidential communication to this almost total
stranger, "and what is more, on my marrying a rich man."

"And what are your plans?" he asks, with an air of benevolent interest,
but that unexplained shade is still there.

"Their name is Legion," I answer; "you will be very tired before I get
to the end of them."

"Try me."

"Firstly then," say I, narratively, "my husband must