. You will find the invoice inside my davenport.
We must go down this afternoon and superintend the unpacking."

"Very well," I said; "but I cannot stay longer now."

I did not go on with any lighter heart than before this meeting with
Julia. I had scrutinized her face, voice, and manner, with unwonted
criticism. As a rule, a face that has been before us all our days is as
seldom an object of criticism as any family portrait which has hung
against the same place on the wall all our lifetime. The latter fills up
a space which would otherwise be blank; the former does very little
else. It never strikes you; it is almost invisible to you. There would
be a blank space left if it disappeared, and you could not fill it up
from memory. A phantom has been living, breathing, moving beside you,
with vanishing features and no very real presence.

I had, therefore, for the first time criticised my future wife. It was a
good, honest, plain, sensible face, with some fine, insidious lines
about the corners of the eyes and lips, and across the forehead. They
could hardly be called wrinkles yet, but they were the first faint
sketch of them, and it is impossible to obliterate the slightest touch
etched by Time. She was five years older than I--thirty-three last
birthday. There was no more chance for our Guernsey girls to conceal
their age than for the unhappy daughters of peers, whose dates are
faithfully kept, and recorded in the Peerage. The upper classes of the
island, who were linked together by endless and intricate ramifications
of relationship, formed a kind of large family, with some of its
advantages and many of its drawbacks. In one sense we had many things in
common; our family histories were public property, as also our private
characters and circumstances. For instance, my own engagement to Julia,
and our approaching marriage, gave almost as much interest to the island
as though we were members of each household.

I have looked out a passage in the standard work upon the Channel
Islands. They are the words of an Englishman who was studying us more
philosophically than we imagined. Unknown to ourselves we had been under
his microscope. "At a period not very distant, society in Guernsey
grouped itself into two divisions--one, including those families who
prided themselves on ancient descent and landed estates, and who
regarded themselves as the _pur sang_; and the other, those whose
fortunes had chiefly been made during the