"But what?" she asked, filling his pause.
"I hate advertisement—that is, unnecessary advertisement," Chilminster corrected himself. "It would make us—I mean me—look so—so vacillating."
He looked up rather suddenly, and just missed Jeannette's eyes by the thousandth of a second.
What could he mean? she asked herself, while her heart pumped boisterously. Was he magnanimous enough to be thinking of accepting a compromising situation to save her? What he had said sounded very unselfish. Of course, she couldn't allow him to. What a pity he was not an American—or something quite ordinary. Then she might——
"There's nothing for it but to write to the paper, I suppose?" he said ruefully.
"I—I suppose not." The comment was dragged from Jeannette in a tone as unconsciously reluctant as his was rueful.
Chilminster sighed. "It's so rough on you."
Jeannette felt a consuming anxiety to know whether his sympathy was occasioned by the announcement or the suggested denial of it.
"And on you, too," she admitted. "What were you thinking—how did you propose to phrase it?"
"I?" he asked apprehensively. "To be quite frank. I haven't got as far as that. Never wrote to the papers in my life," he added pusillanimously.