"Do I?" (with a pleased smile). "It is clear, then, that one cannot
judge of one's self; on the rare occasions when I look in the glass it
seems to me that, in the course of the last five years, I have grown
into a _very_ old fogy."

"He looks as if he had been so much oftener vexed, and so much seldomer
pleased than you do," continued I, mentally comparing the smooth though
weather-beaten benignity of the straight-cut features beside me, with
the austere and frown-puckered gravity of my father's.

"Does he?" he answers, with an air of half-surprised interest, as if the
subject had never struck him in that light before. "Poor fellow! I am
sorry if it is so. Ah, you see"--with a smile--"he has _six_ more
reasons for wrinkles than I have."

"You mean us, I suppose," I answer matter-of-factly. "As to that, I
think he draws quite as many wrinkles on our faces as we do on his."
Then, rather ashamed of my over-candor, I add, with hurried bluntness,
"You have never been married, I suppose?"

He half turns away his head.

"No--not yet! I have not yet had that good fortune."

I am inwardly amused at the power of his denial. Surely, surely he might
say in the words of Lancelot:

"Had I chosen to wed,
I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine."