From what well-stitched diamond receptacle she had extracted the paper I did not suffer myself to conjecture, but the document was strongly perfumed with violet powder.
"You see, I was coming over," she proceeded to explain, "in any event, and when Mr. D—— talked of sending Bunker—I think it was Bunker—with us, I persuaded him to let me be messenger instead. It wasn't worth while, you know, to have any more people leave the office, you being away, and—Oh, Ada, my dear, here is Mr. Munro!"
As Ada, a slim, willowy creature, with the surprised look in her eyes that has become the fashion of late, came gliding up to me, I thought that the reason for young Bunker's omission from the party was possibly before me.
Bother on her matrimonial, or rather anti-matrimonial, devices! Her maternal solicitude lest Ada should be charmed with the poor young clerk on the passage over had cost me weeks of longer stay. For at this stage a request for any further transfer would have been ridiculous and wrong. As easy to settle it now as to arrange for any one else; so the first of April found me still in London, but leaving it on the morrow for home.
"Bessie is in Lenox, I think," Fanny Meyrick had said to me as I bade her good-bye.
"What! You have heard from her?"
"No, but I heard incidentally from one of my Boston friends this morning that he had seen her there, standing on the church steps."
I winced, and a deeper glow came into Fanny's cheek.
"You will give her my letter? I would have written to her also, but it was indeed only this morning that I heard. You will give her that?"
"I have kept it for her," I said quietly; and the adieus were over.