It came off now.
“Drat it!” I quoted, through my teeth, and hurled the broken arm into a corner with a violence that did some—not much—good to my feelings. “He never told me, Cicely.”
“Because he was too tactful, too nice. He’d too much fine feeling,” she explained eagerly. “He couldn’t possibly ask you so soon after the ‘smash’ in your affairs, and after Colonel Trant’s death, and all. It would have looked too much as if he were taking advantage of that to rush the position. He determined to wait until you—until he—well, to wait,” said Cicely. “He saw I was sympathetic; he didn’t mind telling me all this. But he was going to ask you when he and his mother came back from abroad. All the time, he was simply longing to come and carry you off bodily from that hateful typewriter where he kept thinking of you chained, he said, like Andromeda (who was she, exactly?) to her rock. Only he just wouldn’t. Wasn’t it sweet of him, Tots!”
“To wait and tell all this to another girl?”
“But it was you he was coming round to tell!”
“He didn’t stop to see me.”
“He had to get back to Belgrave Square and dress for a theatre-party of his mother’s.”
“What he came for at all, after yesterday, I don’t see!”
“It was about yesterday he came to see you, Tots! You see, he says he met you, and you seem to have made him understand that you were engaged to be married.”
“Well? Didn’t he believe me? Did he come round here and sit here filling the place with that abominable reek of Egyptian cigarettes—and, yes! finishing all that nice peach jelly I got in specially for you—to find out whether it was true?”