Tony Dalziel was one of those who came early to the Kilburns'. He had asked me beforehand for six dances, and I had given him three. When he appeared it was just in time for the first, a two-step. The second would follow directly after, and the third I knew already, from a note sent me in haste, he would have to miss. "Do you care for this?" he asked, out of breath with his hurry to dress and sprint over from the far-off line of bachelors' quarters. "If you don't, will you come outside and see the moon rise? It's going to be a great sight." There is no poetry in a two-step, and if there were it would have been lost in hopping up and down with Tony, so I chose the moon. I thought the moon a perfectly safe object to gaze at with such a jolly young man, who made jokes at everything in the heavens or upon the earth; and unsuspectingly I went with him to a nook on the veranda screened off with tall plants from an adjacent hammock. It was a nook intended for two and no more. There were a great many nooks of that sort on Mrs. Kilburn's veranda. She specialized in flirtation architecture. "Tell me about everything, please," I cheerfully began. "We haven't very long, have we?" "That's the worst of it," said Tony, "and that's why I must be careful to tell you only the important things. There's just one that really interests me." "What's that?" I asked eagerly. "I hope not that you expect fighting?" "No such luck, I'm afraid. But I'm not worrying about that now. What I want to tell you is this." And to my stupefaction he shot a proposal at my head as if it came out of a field gun. I knew he liked me, and liked to be with me, but I couldn't associate the idea of anything so serious as marriage with Tony Dalziel. I gasped and said he couldn't mean it, but he assured me that he did, and a dictionary full of other assurances besides.