hether I stood on my head or my heels; but Brunow
calling me by name, and the crush thinning just then for a moment, I
made my way easily to the step below the one she stood on, and Brunow
introduced us to each other. Now I had lived very much away from women
all my life. I lost my mother early, and of sisters and cousins and
such-like feminine furniture I had none, so that I had never had
practice among them; and I speak quite honestly in saying that I would
sooner have stormed a breach than have faced this young lady. Not that
even my intolerable shyness and the sense of my own clumsiness before
her could make it altogether disagreeable to be there, but because
there was such a riot in my head-and in my heart, too--and I was mortally
afraid of blurting out something which should tell her how I felt. And
if you will look at it rightly, a gentleman--and when I say a gentleman
I mean nothing more or less than a man of good birth and right
feeling--has no right to think, even in his own heart, too admiringly
of a young lady at their first meeting. At the very moment when I saw
my wife I thought her, I knew her, indeed, to be the most faultlessly
beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I was as certain as I am now that
her soul was as flawless as her face. My heart was right, but I was too
precipitate in my feelings, and if I had dared I would have knelt before
her. All this, I dare say, is romantic and old-fashioned to the verge
of absurdity; but it is so true that all the other truths I have known,
excepting those I have no right to speak of here, seem to fall into
insignificance beside it. I fell in love with my wife there and then;
and without even knowing it I was vowed to her service as truly as I
have been in the forty-two years that have gone by since then. I thank
Heaven for it humbly, for there is nothing which can so help a man in
his struggles against what is base and unworthy in himself as his love
for a good woman. If that has grown to be an old-fashioned doctrine in
these days I am sorry for the world. It is true, it has been true, and
will be true again.

"I have heard of you often, Captain Fyffe," said the charming voice,
"and I am delighted to meet you. Your old comrade, Jack Rollinson, is a
cousin of mine."

I blushed again at this; but I could have heard nothing that would have
pleased me more, for, early as it was, I would have given anything to
stand well in this lady's eyes, and Rollinson and I were fa