“Is it true, then?” gasped Cicely.
“Yes! I told him so. I told Lady Vandeleur so. I am engaged.”
“And not—to him!” Cicely seemed utterly unable to grasp how this could be. “What? After all he’s said—and with his photograph on your dressing-table—not that it’s nearly good enough for him! And after what I told him I hoped——”
“What DID you tell him?” I groaned resignedly.
Cicely twisted the long, slender figure, upon which her equally slender salary as a mannequin depends, into a more comfortable curve against the cushions.
“Well! Poor Mr. Vandeleur! When he said he’d seen you lunching at the Carlton alone with a young man, I told him it must be a mistake. You never did lunch there, or with young men. It was just what I admired you for, when it’s so easy to get into the other way of being rather nice to people just for the sake of their giving you a good time and a change from being at work all day! And even though you’re not a bit stuffy with me because I sometimes do it, you——”
“Never mind me. What did he say?”
“He said: ‘But how could there be a mistake? She brought up this self-satisfied-looking individual and introduced him to my mother as her fiancé. She let us congratulate him!’ I said, ‘Well, but she hasn’t got a fiancé—or I should have known about it! I’ve never heard a syllable. She didn’t even tell me she was going out to lunch. She must have been taken out at a moment’s notice—by a friend of Jack Trant’s, perhaps. Or,’ I said, ‘it may have been someone she absolutely had to meet, on business!’” she continued vaguely—much she knows about business!—“‘Getting a better post, or something of that sort. And when she met you unexpectedly, she was flurried, and didn’t know how to explain. Is your mother rather particular, or strait-laced?’ Mr. Vandeleur said, ‘Very, I am afraid!’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s what must have happened!—Tots, in her nervousness, and not wishing your mother to be shocked, just blurted out ‘fiancé’——”
“Thank you,” I muttered. “I didn’t know I was a blurter-out!”