To all those who had admired and disliked the lovely Rose Birkett it appeared (with the greatest respect for the Royal Navy) quite inevitable that she should marry a naval man. As the elder daughter of the Headmaster of Southbridge School she had every opportunity for trying the effect of her charms on as many as three hundred and twenty-seven members of the opposite sex, ranging from the newest comer in the junior school to Mr. Walker who dealt out the very highest mathematics to a privileged and harassed few and was popularly supposed to be coeval with the late Queen Victoria, but except for one or two junior masters to whom she simply couldn’t help getting engaged, a term which appeared to her parents to mean absolutely nothing except that she would always neglect the man of her choice for any later arrival, the whole school united in a total disregard of ‘that Rose,’ as they called her on the infrequent occasions when they bothered to think about her