l on the face of
the globe, no white-robed seraph in heaven; and for her sake others,
too, strove hard to hope, to help, to shower good wishes and
congratulation.

"But to think of my little girl in love," said Archer, with brimming
eyes. "Why, you--you won't be nineteen!"

"And mother was but seventeen when she married you," softly laughed
Lilian, snuggling to his side.

"And Mr. Willett so far from his captaincy," sighed her mother.

"Much nearer than father was to even a first lieutenancy when you
married him," was the joyous answer. "_He_ was only a second
lieutenant by brevet."

"Well," said Mrs. Archer, "it seems different--somehow."

And so it seemed to us. "All too brief a wooing," said poor Archer.
"God send her longer wedded bliss!"

CHAPTER XVI.

Moreover, as some one said in speaking of the sudden engagement, "It
came about on a Friday evening, didn't it?" And then, too, when people
were talking it over a few weeks later, as Mrs. Archer said, "it seemed
different." Soldier folk sometimes have superstitions as surely as the
sailor man is never without his, and a start on a voyage of love life,
clearing port of a Friday evening, had its inauspicious side. But for
the mishap that suddenly enveloped the happy man in flames at a moment
when he was sprawled on his back with his whole right side, as it were,
in a sling, Mr. Harold Willett might indeed have returned to duty and
department headquarters with no other encumbrance than a mortgaged pay
account, and it was not fair to Lilian to speak of her engagement as
"announced" that Friday evening; but in her wondrous happiness she
could find no fault with anything about it. It was all just perfect,
just heavenly (where they neither give nor are given in marriage, which
possibly accounts, as said our cynic, for so much that is heavenly
about it). As an engagement, in fact, it did not exist until four days
later, after other and equally important things had occurred, and we
have merely taken Lilian's point of view, and left them out of that
chapter and all consideration, as she did, so far as we are concerned,
in order to have it all over and done with. But of course there had to
be time for Willett to recover from the effects of the shock, to be
clothed in his right mind and something less fragmentary than the
relics of a _robe de nuit_, and a day in which to realize what had
taken place. (I shrewdly suspect that our good friend Mrs. Stannard saw
t