He was actually laughing himself now. This made his face look at least ten years younger, changing him so that I felt him to be even more of a stranger to me than the machine-like autocrat who rapped out his “Now, Miss Trant!” and his “Take this down” at the Near Oriental. But in a moment he was serious again. He seemed, for the first time, to feel something of what I’ve been feeling ever since we’ve been—so to speak, “engaged.”
“It’s asking a good deal, but I have to trust to you to meet all these awkwardnesses as well as you can,” he said gravely. “And I’ll do all in my power to avoid them, I assure you. A good deal of the strangeness can be put down to the—er—natural shyness of people who are—so—er—recently engaged.”
“Oh, of course,” I murmured, struggling not to laugh any more.
But I wondered what other wild fictions about “Nancy” he’d had to improvise for his mother. Supposing she’d wanted to know what I was like to look at? Well, he wouldn’t know! Dark or fair—short or tall? As likely as not he’d tell her—as something had to be said—that I was six foot high and a radiant blonde. And what would she think of his not possessing a single photograph of me to show her? Really, he was almost benighted enough, since he’d given me another girl’s name, to pass off as mine another girl’s portrait!
Even as I was laughing to myself again, the car turned in at a stone-pillared entrance, and its plumply-tyred wheels purred on a perfectly-gravelled drive between tall laurel-hedges.
Oh! we were nearly there, then. I didn’t want to laugh any more. Now for it....
CHAPTER XI
MEETING “HIS” PEOPLE
We skirted what seemed like an ocean of green velvet turf. We swept round another corner.