Moreover, as some one said in speaking of the sudden engagement, "It came about on a Friday evening, didn't it?" And then, too, when people were talking it over a few weeks later, as Mrs. Archer said, "it seemed different." Soldier folk sometimes have superstitions as surely as the sailor man is never without his, and a start on a voyage of love life, clearing port of a Friday evening, had its inauspicious side. But for the mishap that suddenly enveloped the happy man in flames at a moment when he was sprawled on his back with his whole right side, as it were, in a sling, Mr. Harold Willett might indeed have returned to duty and department headquarters with no other encumbrance than a mortgaged pay account, and it was not fair to Lilian to speak of her engagement as "announced" that Friday evening; but in her wondrous happiness she could find no fault with anything about it. It was all just perfect, just heavenly (where they neither give nor are given in marriage, which possibly accounts, as said our cynic, for so much that is heavenly about it). As an engagement, in fact, it did not exist until four days later, after other and equally important things had occurred, and we have merely taken Lilian's point of view, and left them out of that chapter and all consideration, as she did, so far as we are concerned, in order to have it all over and done with. But of course there had to be time for Willett to recover from the effects of the shock, to be clothed in his right mind and something less fragmentary than the relics of a _robe de nuit_, and a day in which to realize what had taken place. (I shrewdly suspect that our good friend Mrs. Stannard saw to it that Mr. Willett was informed of what Lilian had done and suffered on his account, if she did not dilate on what Lilian had betrayed.) And then came his very properly worded plea to be allowed to see her and thank her; and when there was equally proper demur on Mrs. Archer's part, Willett made his avowal in what even the mother held to be manly and convincing fashion, for, now that she knew that her darling's heart was gone--that it was too late to avert the inevitable--mother-like, she strove to see with her darling's eyes all that was good in him, and there was so _very_ much that was good-looking. She never even hinted to her husband, much less to Lilian, that she had heard the paragon most vehemently accused of most unmanly and unbecoming conduct (for what was Mr. Case, after all, but an irresponsible inebriate?), and she saw that her daughter's happiness was wrapped up in this brilliant and most presentable young soldier. Willett certainly gave many a promise of eminence in his career and profession, so she set herself at once to work to talk the general into complaisance, and he, who loved her with all his heart, and believed her the best, the bravest, fondest, truest wife in all the army (as indeed she might have been without being the wisest), and who could