Cicely looked rather darkly at her questioner.
'What do you mean?'
'I want you to help me get an appointment for somebody.'
'For whom?'
'For the man Daisy Stewart wants to marry.'
Cicely could not conceal her start.
'I don't like being mystified,' she said coldly.
Marsworth allowed his smile to shew itself.
'I'm not trying to mystify you in the least. Daisy Stewart has been engaged for nearly a year to one of the house-surgeons in your hospital—young Fellows. Nobody knows it—not Willy even. It has been kept a dead secret, because that wicked old man the Rector won't have it. Daisy makes him comfortable, and he won't give her up, if he can help it. And as young Fellows has nothing but his present pay—a year with board and lodging—it seemed hopeless. But now he has got his eye on something.'
And in a quiet business-like voice Marsworth put the case of the penniless one—his qualifications, his ambitions, and the particular post under the Army Medical Board on which he had set his hopes. If only somebody with influence would give him a leg up!