“Thank you,” he had murmured as he took the cup from me. There was another pause, which was—as I fully intended—the first of many. Then he added, in a rather uncertain sort of voice, “I suppose it was my mother’s—my mother who sent you in here?”
“Yes! Oh, yes,” I said hastily, as if breathlessly flurried and meek beyond all words. “She seemed to think—I didn’t know what else to do—am I in your way?” (Here I glanced up at him with scared, appealing eyes as much as to say, “Is it my fault if I am?”)
Pause.
“I am afraid,” said the Governor, rather as if the words were forced from him, “that I shall have to ask you to put with up this—er—incongruity for the next half-hour or so. Won’t you sit down, Miss Trant?” And he wheeled forward one of those capacious arm-chairs, placing it at a mercifully wide distance from the fender-stool—where Mrs. Waters perhaps imagined we were at that moment sitting—Oh shade of everything that’s wildly impossible!—sitting together like ordinary young engaged people, hand in hand—or however they do sit. My goodness!
I sat down, dropping my eyes demurely, and folding my hands in my lap.
Another pause.
“I—er——” said the Governor, then stopped and tried to look as if he hadn’t begun a sentence.
“Yes? Is there anything that I can—that you think I ought to be able to do for you while I am here, Mr. Waters?”
“Perhaps it might be wiser if you stopped calling me by that name”—dryly. He seemed to have pulled himself together with a jerk, for he was looking and speaking more like himself at this. However, it had no effect on me.
“Oh, of course,” I said obediently, “I shall always remember to call you B——by your Christian name (that is an abbreviation, too, isn’t it?) when we are with the others.”