Apart from the business, I had some anxiety caused by a letter from the Quartermaster-Sergeant. Written, as usual, in pencil, and mentioning, as always, that he was in the pink, it said that he hoped to be coming home on leave soon; his first call would be given to his parents, and he then proposed to look in at Gloucester Place and thank me for the journals sent to him each week. I wished the man further. I felt sorry I had ever hit upon the idea of posting the illustrated newspaper, or of writing. I had some thought to going away to escape him, but one did not know where to go. The postscript to the letter offered some hope: it said that leave was a doubtful thing in these days, and I was not to be disappointed if it happened that he could not get away. And I was beginning to think I had worried myself over nothing at all, when a telegram signed Cartwright came from Folkestone. I showed it to Miss Katherine.
"But, my dear soul," she protested, "you're trembling. In your own words, you're all of a fluster."
"The mistake I made was in not telling him my age at the outset."
"That would have been an eccentric course to pursue. It is one that I, myself, rarely adopt in these situations."
"You're young, Miss Katherine, and it doesn't matter what they imagine your age to be. I'm getting on towards the forties, and it matters a good deal to me. I've always tried to write to this blessed man in a cheerful style, and if he has got the idea that I'm twenty-two, and look less, one can't blame him."
"There are beauty specialists in Bond Street."
"And there are foolish women who patronise them."
"If he comes along," said Miss Katherine, "when I am home from the bank, I could—pardon the conceit in the suggestion, for which I am sure Heaven will forgive me—I could pretend to be you, Weston."
"That wouldn't do at all," I declared promptly. "I want to see him. Want to find out what he is like."
"The next best idea that occurs to my inventive brain," she remarked, "is that I should take you in hand to-morrow morning before I leave, and by all the dodges known to my toilet table, subtract a few years from your appearance."