ul to me that the cheerful, talkative man beside me, my own
father's little brother, a traveller in distant countries, and a most
innocent man, and with all the inveterate habits of thirty years'
honourable bachelorhood and all the mellowness of life upon him,
should, without consulting me, have taken the first irrevocable step
towards becoming a ratepayer, a pew tenant, paterfamilias, a fighter
with schoolmasters, and the serf of a butler, that I scarcely knew what
to say adequate to the occasion.

"Well," said I at last, with an involuntary sigh, "I suppose I must
congratulate you."

"Don't look at it in that light, George," said my uncle; and he added
in a more cheerful tone, "I am only going to get engaged, you know."

"You can scarcely imagine, George," he proceeded, "how I have longed to
be engaged. All my life it has been my hope and goal. It is, I think,
the ideal state of man. There was a chap with me when I was at
Kimberley who first put the idea into my head. His ways were animated
and cheerful even for a diamond field, where you know animation and
cheerfulness are, so to speak, _de rigueur_. Whisky he affected, and
jesting of the kind that paints cities scarlet. And he used every
night, before festivities began, to write a long letter to some girl in
England, and say, within limits, how bad he had been and how he longed
to reform and be with her, and never, never do anything wrong any more.
He poured all the higher and better parts of his nature into the
letter, and folded it up and sealed it very carefully. And then he
came to us in a singularly relieved frame of mind, and would be the
life and soul of as merry a game of follow-your-leader as one can well
imagine."

Pleasant reminiscences occupied him for a moment. "Every man should be
engaged, I think, to at least one woman. It is the homage we owe to
womankind, and a duty to our souls. His _fiancee_ is indeed the
Madonna of a true-hearted man; the thought of her is a shrine at the
wayside of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we
cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible,
something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful,
and yet something of the Holy Grail as well. You have no rights with
her, nor she with you; you owe her no definite duties, and yet she is
singularly yours. A smile is a favour, a touch of her fingers, a faint
pressure of your hand, is an infinite privilege. Y