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 you know. She has married off three of them already."

"Three sisters?"

"No; two sisters and a father. There's nobody left now, but these two."

It was all very like that trip on the lagoons yesterday; only, in the one case, he had seen the lagoons through the eyes of his Pollys, while to-day he seemed to be seeing his Pollys through the eyes of the woman he loved. And he found that gracious sharing of his interest a balm to the old wound, and he was soothed and beguiled into a strange new acquiescence. It would come again, the importunate trouble. He should, in a very few minutes, bring down upon himself that gentle refusal, more poignant in its kindness than scorn or misprision would have been.

As he sat there touching upon one characteristic and another of his Pollys, in the direct, soldierly fashion that cuts through ordinary modes of speech, clean and incisive as a sword-point, he vaguely felt that this was only a postponement, a