He broke off for a moment, and I remembered how he glowered ecstatically into the fire. Then he concluded—
"And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry."
"Man," he said, "that's fine! That's poetry. That's the real thing!"
I had agreed. It is no use arguing with a Scot about Burns. (I remember once being nearly dirked at a Caledonian Dinner because I ventured to remark that "before ye" was not in my opinion a good rhyme to "Loch Lomond.")
However, Kitty and I were unable to decide whether Robin's "bonnie lass" on that occasion had been a personality or an abstraction.
"Mightn't it be one of the Twins?" I remarked.
"Well, it might be," admitted Kitty judicially, "but he has kept it very close if it is. No," she continued more decidedly, "I don't think it can be. They are quite out of his line. Besides—it would be too absurd!"
It was not one Twin at any rate, for a fortnight later Dilly sprung upon us the third surprise of the series I have mentioned. She announced that she had decided to marry Dicky Lever.
There was, I suppose, nothing very surprising in that. Dicky had been in constant attendance upon the Twins for nearly two years, and had long since graduated into the ranks of the Good Sorts. The surprise to us—rather unreasonably, perhaps—lay in the fact of—