When Nora and the boys came home they opened their eyes when they heard of our adventures. And what amazed me was that they seemed to take it quite for granted that Philip and I should be on the terms we were. Dick offered his congratulations--if they could be called congratulations--in the most extraordinary form. "Well, old man, you've escaped one funeral, but you're booked for another--that's a cert.!" The opinions which brothers allow themselves to utter of their sisters are astonishing. Fancy Dick calling me a funeral! VII A GIRL WHO COULDN'T I am almost perfectly happy; but an unfaltering regard for the strict truth compels me to state that I am not quite. I wish I could--conscientiously--say that I was. But I cannot. I am aware that when a girl is engaged--especially when she is just engaged--her happiness ought to be flawless. And mine was, until-- However, perhaps I had better come to the point. It is not my fault if I cannot do everything. I can do some things. When I turn the matter over in my mind, systematically, I feel justified in asserting that I can do a good many things. It is a well-known scientific fact that a Jack-of-all-trades is master of none. Therefore it seems to me to follow as a matter of course that because I can do the things which I can do, I cannot do the things which I cannot do. Nothing could be simpler. Or more obvious. We cannot all of us be Admirable Crichtons. And it is just as well that we cannot. And yet, merely on that account, I have lately suffered--well, I have suffered a good deal. Nothing could have given me greater pleasure than the knowledge that Philip had a mother and two sisters. When Mrs Sandford--that is his mother--wrote and said that Philip had told her about the understanding he and I had come to; that she would very much like to know her dear son's future wife; so would I spend a few days with her in her cottage on the Thames, I was delighted. There was a note from each of the sisters--Bertha and Margaret--echoing their mother's words, and that also was very nice. I sat down then and there, and replied to them all three, arranging to go to them on the Tuesday following. As soon as I had despatched my letters I became conscious of feeling--I hardly know how to put it--of feeling just the slightest atom unsettled; as if I had the shadow of a shade of a suspicion that I had let myself in for something which might turn out to be, I didn't quite know what. Directly I got there--or very nearly directly--certainly within half an hour of my arrival, I realised that my premonitions had not been airy fictions of my imagination; but sound and solid forebodings, which might--and probably would--turn out to be only too well justified by events.