"She writes a neat hand after all," he murmured, as he scanned the superscription. A bad sign that. A man in love should be the last person to ask for an opinion of the handwriting of his sweetheart. When he can speak with deliberation on the subject or think of it with detachment, he has become critical, and the end—happy or otherwise—is not far off. Happy only if there is still time or courage to draw back.
"She writes a neat hand after all," said Henry, as he rammed his finger into the flap of the scented envelope and burst it open. "After all!" These even more than the words preceding them were suggestive.
The hour was late, and who knows but that may, to some extent, have been responsible for the blinking mood in which the young man read his sweetheart's letter? It was the typical feminine scrawl, chiefly chatter about society doings in Laysford.
"Oh, I'm becoming quite a giddy girl, dearest, and me engaged. It's too awful. Just fancy, I've been to three functions—three! Poor me that used to go nowhere at all. The Mellises' garden party was a very swell affair. I was there because I teach the daughter the pianoforte—and a silly thing she is. But—don't be angry now, Hal—who do you think took me to the Mayor's reception? Why, that terrible goose, Mr. Trentham, the Mayor's secretary. You remember him? Short, stout, fair moustache, but always well dressed. Fancies himself, rather. He has asked me to go with him to another reception, when some sort of conference comes to Laysford. I don't know what it is, but the receptions are all right. Lots of fun and the best of everything. Perhaps you wouldn't like me to go, dearest? But really you needn't be jealous. Trentham is really a goose. Only one is so dull, and then everybody knows I'm engaged."
Henry knew, certainly; and he had no doubt the "everybody" was not unjustified. He accepted the information without a pang of jealousy.
"Everybody knows I'm engaged." Somehow, he would not readily have confessed to delight in the fact. Trentham he did not recall as suggestive of the ungainly biped. "Rather a decent sort of chap," thought Henry. "Not much in Flo's way, I imagine." He blinked through the remainder of the letter, never dreaming—though near to dreamtime—that Trentham was wondering what Flo could see in Henry Charles. The man who can divine just why another man loves or admires one woman, or why a woman "sees anything" in another man, has yet to be born. He was certainly neither Henry Charles nor Mr. Trentham.
"Not a word from Flo about her mother," Henry reflected, on his way to bed. "Just like her—all about herself. I wonder if I'm an ass!"
How unreasonable men are. Why should Flo have written about anyone but herself?
It was time for Henry to wonder. But he was still wondering months later, when Trentham was not.
The fact is, this Trentham was a very fair specimen of the average bull-headed Englishman, and better than most in the eyes of Miss Winton, since he enjoyed a private income, which made him quite independent of the salary attaching to his official position. His name cropped up frequently for a time in Flo's letters to Henry, but the latter scarcely referred to it in any of his replies, from which Flo judged him jealous, and when Trentham had never a mention from her, Henry supposed him circling in some other orbit. Here, of course, he was wrong, and he might have noticed a lowering temperature in the tone of Flo's epistles. There was still need to ask himself whether he was an ass, and to answer in the affirmative. But he never thought out an answer until one day it came ready-made in a fine right-hander, which took his breath away: