"'Yes, let's have it out,' she said, and I looked at her standing there in her khaki, but somehow I only saw her in a frock again, and I thought to myself all in a rush, 'All right, you asked to have it out, and you shall,' and so I just blurted out, 'It was seeing you, and knowing all in a minute how much I wanted you myself—and remembering.'
"'Remembering what?' she says as sharp as a needle.
"And I said, 'My dear, I haven't a bean.'
"And I grabbed up my hat and gloves and I think I would have said 'Good-bye' and bolted.
"But she just looked at me so that I couldn't.
"Then she looked away and said, 'If beans are all that matter——!' and then she picked a couple of violets out of the vase by that photograph, and tucked them into her jacket, and, just like a kid, said, 'Jim always loved me to have a good time. Jim would like me to have everything I liked, I know he would——'
"And here's where the room seemed to go round and round until it steadied down with me holding her tight....
"Well, then, Miss Olwen——well, then, there we were; engaged! Or practically then," amended little Mr. Brown, his pink face deepening in hue. "It was hours after that that I began to grasp how little it mattered about my not having anything but debts to ask any girl to marry me on; why, great Scott, d'you know who she is? Her Uncle, her hubby's father, is old Jack Robinson of Robinson and Mott; he's got the biggest aeroplane-body business in the Midlands, and he, this Jim of hers——well, she's got all he was to have. He arranged it so. She was to marry again if she liked, and whom she liked. And——Well, she's a girl who might have her pick; apart from the money. Then there's all her money as well; and yet——yet——"
He paused for words just as the band at the other end of the tea-room got the upper hand of the buzz of talk and sent a lilt of insistent melody through the air above the parties.
"Fancy you fancying me" was the tune.