I was biting my lips in the meantime and saying, “My dear Grace,” at intervals, in so thin a voice that it went entirely unheeded. The unhappy thing was my conscientiousness. For I felt that I should not be justified in calling my pitiful efforts a veritable proposal, since Grace had persisted in regarding them as nothing more consequent than a feeble joke in rather questionable taste. But, cost what it might, I was going to see the matter through, having once embarked upon it.
“Hampshire, 203 all out,” Grace continued. “Somerset, 115 for 5. Wicket must be fiery; yet it shouldn’t be. Wonder if they’ve watered it? Something’s up. Shouldn’t get out like that ’gainst that sort o’ bowling. Wynyard, 70. Oh, and Vernon Hill 42, not out. Tyler, 6 wickets for 90. They’ve been watering the wicket, that’s what they’ve been doing. And now for the third. Hanged if I can tell where it’s from. All the cricket’s come. I’ll open it, though, as my name’s Trentham.”
“It might be for somebody else, as there’s one or two other people called Trentham in addition to yourself,” said I, trying to introduce a word by hook or by crook, and being also in that perverted condition of mind when a man longs to say something with a bit of a sting in it.
“Really!” said she. “How clever of you to have thought of that, Dimmy! But as ‘Trentham, Hickory’s’ me as much as anybody else, here goes!”
Now as the contents of this telegram had so dire an effect on the industrious Miss Grace, and the results of it were so far-reaching, I think it only right that it should have a chapter all to itself.
CHAPTER XVI
A Telegram from Stoddart
THE third telegram ran to this tenour,—
“If Hawke wants you for India, sing slow. You are going with me. Stoddart.”
Miss Grace had a mounting colour as she read this, and I believe swimming eyes and a reeling brain. I think she would have liked to weep for joy.
“Oh, Dimmy,” she said, “isn’t it divine! Isn’t it noble of old Stoddy! But I knew it, I knew it all along. It would have been impossible not to take old Charlie. Wonder what the boys’ll say?”