“A fortnight after that, Nancy, you were defying me in my own den! That frock, and—chucking my ring about the piano! And now ...” he said, with a hand in his jacket-pocket, “now, Miss Trant, I’m going to put that ring back, if I may, in its proper place.”
He would have taken my hand, but all in my flurry of delight I put them both behind me.
“No! Wait! Your people—what will they say to—all this?”
“But ... bless me! they know we’re engaged!”
“Yes, that way,” I said shakily. “But this?”
“D’you suppose, Nancy-Monica Trant, that they’re ever going to know that there’s any difference? D’you think ‘Theo will notice’ any? I doubt if they’d believe that yarn if we told them! Very soon we shan’t believe it ourselves! So——Wait? I’ve waited too long!”
But I was, all of a sudden, shy of him as I’d never been in my trembling typist days. I put him back with a look.
“How long?” I asked falteringly. “Can’t you tell me when?”
His face was full of protest, but he leaned, half-sitting, against the edge of his desk.
“What can I tell you?” he said. “That it was just now in Battersea Park, seeing that the girl one can’t stop squabbling with is the girl one has to make love to——”