Stupefied, I sat staring at his letter.

Now a proposal of marriage from almost any young man in this world would bring its special thrill to almost any girl. This, quite apart from whether she accepts it or refuses. Isn't that true, girls?

So it shows what a stupor of despair I was in that morning, when I tell you that only for a fleeting moment did I forget my troubles in the excitement of this Mr. Wynn's letter.

I sighed as I got up, feeling a little dizzy from my perch on the National Gallery steps, for St. Martin's Church clock showed half-past one, and it was time I started walking slowly back to that revolting office. I'd had no lunch, but lunch-time would be considered over by the time I had crawled down Whitehall again. Heavens! How I hated Whitehall, and wished that I never need set eyes upon ...

Here the quite wild idea sprang into my mind.

"What about this way out of it? What if this were what I was longing for, the chance of a completely new life? Something to whisk me right away out of everything that I knew in the days of Harry! Here's this Mr. Richard Wynn—who was quite a nice young man, if I could only remember his face a little bit more distinctly—asking to marry me. What if I said 'Yes'? Since I was not to marry Harry, what did it matter what sort of a man I did marry? But what was he like?"

Frowning, I tried to remember. Dark, tall, Norfolk jacket, loved dogs—that was as far as I got. Not a detail of his face could I recall! An unawakened girl-child, as I was seven years ago, takes scant notice of masculine faces. All she thinks of them is "How ugly they are; how very unlike the people in books that the beautiful ladies are always falling in love with"—and that's the summing-up of it for her, until she is seventeen or so. (Unless she's of the type of my little chum Elizabeth, who at twenty-one continued to hold this view.)

But what about this Richard Wynn, who at nineteen had seemed a century older than I?

Nowadays, I should not consider as a grown-up man that youth who'd devoured such platefuls of cold mutton and bread and cheese at my father's table. I wondered listlessly how he'd grown up. Quite cold-bloodedly—for remember what I was going through—I began to debate whether I'd say I would see him. It might be better than the office; better than living exactly the same life day after day, without Harry. And Harry would hear if I got engaged.

How many engagements, I wonder, are entered into in the mood in which I was at that darkest of moments?