For all the brave way in which Aida had taken her grisly experience--and the full gruesomeness of her peril and narrow escape had been borne in upon her, especially during the trial and the revelations it had evolved--an impression had been left upon her mind which rendered the life to which she had been looking forward, and its associations, distasteful to her for the present. So after our marriage, which took place a month later than the dark and tragical circumstances I have just recorded, we decided to start for a prolonged tour of a year or more in Europe. That time was a halcyon time for me, falling in no whit short of what I had always pictured it in anticipation. We did not hurry ourselves. We took things easily, and thus were spared all the worry and flurry of those who do not. In consequence we were able to enjoy to the full the pick of the Old World in all that was beautiful or interesting, and after my twenty years of up-country knocking about, and generally roughing it, everything enjoyed in such association was both. The farm I had bought for our joint occupation I was able to dispose of at a trifling loss, and my trading store I sold at some profit; which made things not merely as broad as they were long, as the saying goes, but broader. But before we started on our tour it transpired that Edith Sewin and Kendrew had managed to compass a very mutual excellent understanding--it might have occurred to me at the time of our anxiety and grief that Kendrew had displayed quite an unusual familiarity in his references to my sister-in-law elect, but I suppose in the all-absorbing anguish of my own loss I had no mind to give to any such trivial detail. But as we were to be away a long time, the artful dog took advantage of the circumstance to hurry forward his own ambition. It would never do, he urged--they both urged--for the presence of her only sister to be wanting at Edith's marriage, and in the result if there was not a double wedding, at any rate there were two within a very short time of each other. Well, we were all glad. Kendrew was a good fellow--a thoroughly good fellow--and the farm he had inherited through poor old Hensley's murder was a right good one. He was going to throw up transport-riding and work it, he declared, and he did.