himself--

"O, my love is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
My love is like a melody
That's sweetly played in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I----"

He broke off for a moment, and I remembered how he glowered ecstatically
into the fire. Then he concluded--

"And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry."

"Man," he said, "that's fine! That's poetry. That's the real thing!"

I had agreed. It is no use arguing with a Scot about Burns. (I remember
once being nearly dirked at a Caledonian Dinner because I ventured to
remark that "before ye" was not in my opinion a good rhyme to "Loch
Lomond.")

However, Kitty and I were unable to decide whether Robin's "bonnie lass"
on that occasion had been a personality or an abstraction.

"Mightn't it be one of the Twins?" I remarked.

"Well, it _might_ be," admitted Kitty judicially, "but he has kept it
very close if it is. No," she continued more decidedly, "I don't think
it can be. They are quite out of his line. Besides--it would be too
absurd!"

It was not one Twin at any rate, for a fortnight later Dilly sprung upon
us the third surprise of the series I have mentioned. She announced that
she had decided to marry Dicky Lever.

There was, I suppose, nothing very surprising in that. Dicky had been in
constant attendance upon the Twins for nearly two years, and had long
since graduated into the ranks of the Good Sorts. The surprise to
us--rather unreasonably, perhaps--lay in the fact of--

1. Dicky having definitely fixed upon a particular Twin to propose to;

2. That Twin having definitely selected Dicky out of the assortment at
her command.

I was so accustomed to seeing my sisters-in-law compassed about by a
cloud of young men who appeared to admire them both equally, and to whom
they appeared to apportion their favours with indiscriminate
_camaraderie_, that the idea of one admirer stealing a march on all the
others seemed a little unfair, somehow.

As Dolly remarked, it would break up the firm horribly.

"You see," she confided to me rather plaintively, "Dilly will have no
use for them now, and they'll have still less use for her--an engaged
girl beside other girls is about as exciting as a tapioca-pudding at a
Lord Mayor's Banquet--and they will only have me. That won't be half the
fun."

"I should have thought that your fun would have been exactly doubled," I