His Official Fiancée

His Official Fiancée

By Berta Ruck (Mrs. Oliver Onions)

TORONTO:
WILLIAM BRIGGS
1914

Printed in Great Britain

DEDICATED TO
THE TWO GRANNIES

CONTENTS

HIS OFFICIAL FIANCÉE

CHAPTER I
THE SUMMONS

“‘A girl without a sweetheart,’ girls—(I was readin’ something about it this very morning ’s I was coming along in the Toob),” chattered little Miss Holt over her work. “A girl without a sweetheart is like a ship at sea, without knowing what port she’s to put in at——”

“Accounts for the way a lot of ’em seem to pick their sweethearts on the principle ‘Any port in a storm!’” said Miss Robinson, with her little sniff.

“Well! Seems to me there’s a good deal in the idea that a poor husband is better than none,” came philosophically from Miss Holt, whose back is always curved like a banana over her typing-table, and who “smarms” her dull brown hair down under a hair-net until her head looks like a chocolate. “After all, my dear, if you’re married, you’re married; and nobody can say you aren’t. But if you aren’t married, you aren’t. And nobody can say you are!”.

“How true,” said Miss Robinson dreamily. “Got that, Miss Trant?”

And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller:

“Miss Trant, if you please?”

My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy.

“Yes? What is it, Harold?”

“Miss Trant, Mr. Waters says he wishes to see you in his private room at two o’clock.”

“To see me?” I asked in a panic; hoping that it might not be true, that by some lucky chance my ears had deceived me. They hadn’t.

“Yes; at two o’clock sharp, miss.”

“Very well, Harold,” I heard myself say in a small, dismayed voice.

Then I heard the door of our room shut upon the office-boy’s exit.

I turned, to meet the shrewd, sympathetic brown eyes of Miss Robinson over her machine.

“Governor sent for you?”

I nodded dismally.

“Any idea what it’s about, Miss Trant?”

“Oh, it might be about anything this last week,” I sighed. “It might be about my forgetting to enclose those enclosures to the Western Syndicate. Or for leaving out the P.T.O. at the bottom of that Budapest letter. Or for spelling Belgium B-e-l-g-u-i-m. Or half a dozen other things. I knew Mr. Dundonald was going to complain of me. It’s been hanging over me for the last three days. Anyhow I shall know the worst to-day.”

“P’raps he’ll give you another chance, dear,” said little Miss Holt.

“That’s not very likely,” I said. “He’s such an abominably accurate machine himself that he’s ‘off’ anybody in this office who isn’t a machine too, girl or man.”

“D’you suppose the Governor even knows which of us is a girl and which is a man? because I don’t,” put in Miss Robinson. “I bet you he——”

“Talking in theyairr!” interrupted the grating Scotch accent of Mr. Dundonald, as he passed through to the Governor’s room, where, alas! I, Monica Trant, was soon to present myself.

A deathly silence, broken only by the clicking of the four typewriters, fell upon our department.

But I’m pretty sure that all the work I did from then on until lunch-time was of very little good.

That gloomy typists’ room, looking over the “well” of the great buildings in Leadenhall Street, and so dark that we worked always by electric lights, switched on one over each machine, faded away from me. I ceased to know I was breathing in that familiar smell of fog and mackintoshes and dust and stuffiness. I ceased to hear the muffled roar of the City outside, and the maddening “click! click-a-click-pprring!” of the typewriters within, as I shut myself into my own mind.

Dismally I reviewed my own situation.

Here was I, “alone in London,” all my poor little capital spent on the business-training which I had joyfully hoped was going to bring me in a nice “independent-feeling” income of at least two pounds a week. At the offices of William Waters and Son, of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency, a post I had obtained after weeks of weary searching for work, my salary was twenty-five shillings a week. Now, in all probability, I was going to lose even that. And then what was I to do? How was I to go on contributing my half of the rent of the Marconi Mansions flat; how was I to pay for even my cheap meals and my “these’ll-have-to-do” clothes? How was I to earn my living?

Obviously, I’m not cut out for a business-girl!

My three months in the office has plainly shown me that.

“You lack method, Miss Trant”—as Mr. Dundonald, the head of our department, has told me more than once. “You lack concentrrayshn. You are intelligent enough, for a young lady, but when I think I can rrely on you, what happens? I find ye out in some rideeclus mistake that the rrrawest student from Pitman’s wouldn’t make. And this after I’ve warrrned you times and again. What do you think is going to be the end of it?”

Evidently the sack.

And what else is there I can do?

Nothing!

I can’t draw fashion-plates or write articles for the magazines.

Go on the stage—no, I never could remember my cue, even in private theatricals. I love children—but people want diplomas and Montessori Systems with their nursery-governesses. For serving in a shop I don’t suppose I’m tall enough. That’s one of the inconsistencies of men—they quote poetry about a girl being “just as high as their hearts,” and then advertise for parlour-maids and mannequins who must stand well over five foot nine, which I don’t. Though, even if my nickname is “Tots,” thank goodness I’m not dumpy, like little Miss Holt, who thinks a poor husband is better than none....

What about the principal profession open to women—getting married?

Well, but I never see any men, now a days—you can’t call things-in-the-City men, exactly—whom I could get married to. Besides, there’s nobody, now that I’m an unbecomingly-dressed pauper, who would want to marry me.—Except, perhaps ... Sydney Vandeleur ...? Dear old Sydney is a friend left over from the days before the smash in our family when “the world was more than kin when we had the ready tin.” I’ve seen him several times since, and he was just the same as ever, so sympathetic and amusing; such a “pal,” and with something about him that made me quite certain he’d be ready to become something more, the minute I encouraged him.

“Encouraging” him wouldn’t be too unpleasant either, though I never was in love with Sydney. By this time I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not a bit the falling-in-love type of girl. Major Montresor, of father’s regiment in the old days, told my brother Jack once that “little Monica had the makings of a first-class flirt; she belonged to the successful Order of the Cold Coquette.” After listening to the dodderings and drivels and despairs of girls who aren’t cold, I’m rather thankful that I am. At least I can be fond enough of people in a sensible sort of way. I could be of Sydney.

I suppose it will end in my getting him to marry me....

But not yet. I haven’t even got his address! He and his mother have gone on a tour to Japan, and they won’t be within reach for so much as a dinner for about a year. Whereas it’s to-day, this afternoon, that I’m to get the sack without knowing what else is to happen to me!

A pretty depressing outlook!

At one o’clock I went out to lunch at what the typists here call “The Den of Lyons,” with Miss Holt and Miss Robinson.

Our fourth typist, pretty, anæmic Miss Smith, had evidently made other arrangements to-day. She wore another hat; a fresh bunch of violets was tucked into her long coat, and she monopolized the looking-glass while she attended to her complexion with a pot of face-cream, a clean hankie, and a book of papiers poudrés.

“We’re extremely smart to-day, Smithie,” said Miss Robinson. “What’s on?”

“I’m going out to lunch with Still Waters.”

This was “the” office joke at the Near Oriental.

“Still Waters” meant no one less than Mr. William Waters, Junior, the head of the firm, who acted as General Manager, and from whom I had just received that fatal summons. He would as soon think of having a word to say to one of his typists out of business-hours as of giving a dance in the office itself. So that the excuse “I’m going out with Still Waters” always means that the speaker intends to keep her engagement to herself. It’s an open secret in the office that Smithie, who keeps a manicure-set in her hand-bag and who blushes twice daily down the telephone, has “got some sort of boy.”

“Oh, all right, haughty! Don’t bother to apologize,” said Miss Holt. And we left Miss Smith to her preparations.

Presently we caught sight of her again in the crowd outside. She didn’t see us, or anything else, I think. She was smiling and sparkling and flushed, and “looked as different as a fortnight’s holiday,” as Miss Robinson said. All three of us glanced from her to the young man she was with. To bring that transfiguring light into a girl’s face, wouldn’t you have expected him to be a mixture of some Greek God and Bombardier Billy Wells?—Far from it. “Smithie’s boy” was scarcely taller than she; narrow-chested office-shouldered, with a face as pale and peaked as a long envelope.

“What a kid!” criticized Miss Holt as we passed.

“All men are awful kids,” pronounced Miss Robinson, “but you do bar them looking it. Of the two, I don’t know that I wouldn’t rather have ’em like graven images!”

Which brought us back to the horrible subject of that graven image, our Governor.

Over glasses of hot milk and the poached-eggs-on-toast, the plates of which rasped on the marble-topped table of the shop that always smells of steak-and-kidney pie, the other girls made themselves specially agreeable to the colleague who was preparing for the sack in another hour.

“It is too bad. We shall miss you from our room,” said good-natured little Miss Holt. “Still—(Here, miss! I said egg, I didn’t say sardine-sandwich! I wish you’d attend when anyone speaks!... She would, if I’d a boy with me! Such is life!)—Still, it isn’t as if there wasn’t other posts you could get. Easily. Don’t you look so hopeless, Miss Trant. You’ve a taking way with you, and a nice smile; wasn’t I passing the remark, only the other day, about what a pretty smile Miss Trant’d got? And, say what you like, looks do count when a young lady’s in business!”

“Yes, it’s a pity Miss Trant don’t know she’s good-looking. We ought to have told her about that, before,” said Miss Robinson dryly. “But you’re all right. You’ll get taken on somewhere where they don’t make an international affair of it over one misplaced comma or a tiny smudge off a new ribbon. You’ll get round the men. I don’t mean Still Waters. He’s not a man, of course. He’s a machine that can say ‘Now, Miss Trant!’”—here she broke into perfect mimicry of the Governor’s curtest tone. “And’ What is the meaning of this evening’s cables being one-fifth of a second after time?’ He doesn’t count. You try for something where there’s a human being at the head of affairs——”

“And if it’s near she can come out to lunch with us just the same as before she left,” suggested Miss Holt.

“She hasn’t even left yet,” said Miss Robinson encouragingly. “What price one of those fancy cakes, Miss Trant? Choose the least poisonous-looking, and I’ll treat you—for luck!”

At a quarter to two we got back to the office.

I went and washed in the dressing-room. I took down all my hair. My hair’s my pet vanity; it’s very long and thick and silky, and “just the colour of massed black pansies against her honeysuckle-coloured flesh-tints,” as Sydney Vandeleur once said. He “puts” everything like the artist that he is. (Oh, why wasn’t it to meet him that I was preparing, instead of that young frozen ogre of a Governor?) I wound the long swathe smoothly round my head again, pinned it firm, and made sure it was all right at the back, not with any idea of impressing Still Waters (who would scarcely have noticed the fact had all his typists been completely bald, so long as they were efficient), but merely because to feel perfectly neat made me a little less painfully nervous.

The clock, striking two, chimed in with my humble tap at the door of Mr. Waters’ private room.

“Come in!” called the dreaded voice of our Governor.

And, trembling inwardly, in I went.

CHAPTER II
THE PROPOSAL

The large, light room, with its handsome furniture, seemed to stretch for miles between the door and the big writing-desk, covered with green leather, at which Mr. Waters himself sat, frowning over a letter. The desk was generally bare but for the note of his day’s appointments, with the hours, on the turnover date-ticket.

“Two o’clock,” and a heavy “X” marked this coming interview, as I could not help seeing when I finished what seemed like a long and tiring walk over the thick crimson carpet, and stood meekly at his elbow.

He looked up, alert, clean-shaven, his fair hair brushed as sleek and shiny as the nap of his own silk hat, his mouth closed as tightly as his own cash-box; he was the very picture of a successful young City man, whose one and only interest is his business.

“Ah! That you, Miss Trant?” he said, in the quick, curt, business-like voice that Miss Robinson can imitate so perfectly.

He wheeled round in the chair to face me.

“Sit down, please.”

I was thankful to sit down. Although I don’t think my panic showed in my face, my knees were actually beginning to give under me. Mr. Waters pointed to a plump, green morocco-covered chair. Down I sat, on the very edge of it. I set my teeth to listen to what this office tyrant had to say.

(How extraordinary that he and Sydney Vandeleur should both be “men”!)

If he only wouldn’t keep me; if he’d only just tell me to go, and get it over....

But his first remark took me absolutely by surprise.

“Now, Miss Trant. If you don’t mind, I want to ask you a few questions. Don’t think them impertinent, for they are not so intended, and they are necessary to the matter in hand. And—please don’t misunderstand them.”

Here his alert face grew even more business-like. His keen grey eyes met my startled brown ones steadily for a moment. Then he added, in an emphatic, “underlined” sort of tone:

“There is nothing in these questions to which your father, or anyone belonging to you, could take any exception. You understand?”

“Understand”—No! I certainly didn’t. What could he mean me to understand? I hadn’t grasped it even when he repeated the question a trifle impatiently.

“You do understand that, Miss Trant?”

“Oh—er—yes—of course,” I murmured, in duty bound.

But I was so utterly dazed by this unlooked-for flight-off-at-a-tangent of the Governor’s that I heard myself answering as if in a dream the questions he put next.

“Twenty-one. You’re of age, then,” I heard him saying through the daze. “Both parents dead: m’m. No one else belonging to you?”

“One brother in South Africa,” my lips answered mechanically. And my inward wonder, “What on earth has that got to do with Mr. Waters?” was mingled with an added dull twinge of anxiety. For I haven’t heard from poor old rolling-stoney Jack for three months or more.

“No one belonging to you in London? M’m. And you’re dependent for your living upon what you earn here?”

(Yes! or else I shouldn’t have to sit here answering questions about things that are absolutely no business of yours! was what I thought rebelliously.) I said aloud, reluctantly, “Yes.”

“Where do you live, then—alone?”

“I share rooms with another girl in Battersea,” I had to tell him, still wondering resentfully what in the world might be the meaning of this catechism. Wasn’t it the prelude to dismissal, after all, then? Wasn’t he preparing to be hateful and sarcastic, and to tell me he felt my talents were being wasted at the Near Oriental (this is one of Mr. Dundonald’s pet clichés), and that he advised me to look out elsewhere for a better position at a higher salary—if I could get it? What would be the next question, then?

It was the last thing that I should have dreamed of his asking.

“Do you mind telling me, Miss Trant, whether you are engaged to be married?”

Engaged? I? What could he want to know that for?

That was less his business, even, than any of the other questions he’d put!

It seemed doubly odd, since I had been meditating on the possibility of “getting engaged” that very morning. Ever since twelve o’clock, the mental image of Sydney Vandeleur’s picturesque, dark face, with his small Vandyke beard and gentle, adoring brown eyes, had been very near me. There was always Sydney in the background, of course. Backgrounds don’t count, presumably. Even if they did, though, what concern was it of my business employer’s? I did wish I had enough self-assurance to announce frankly, “Well, I do mind telling you, as a matter of fact!” But ... twenty-five shillings a week don’t provide a girl with much self-assurance!

I could only let him have the literal answer in return for his direct (and unwarrantable) question.

“Oh, no; I’m not engaged.”

“Good!” said Still Waters briskly. (Why “good”?)

“Now, Miss Trant, I can tell you the reason—or part of the reason—I sent for you this afternoon. I must begin by impressing upon you very definitely that”—here he paused, and at each word of the announcement tapped solemnly on the big desk with his finger—“I don’t want to get married myself.”

“Of course not!” I almost gasped, wondering what in the world this very obvious truth (for one could not imagine Still Waters in connection with marriage or engagements) had got to do with me?

“At the same time, there are reasons why for a time, at least—say a year—it should appear that I was going to be married. I may tell you those reasons later on; that depends. At present I’ll merely tell you that it is important to me that I should be officially, that is nominally, engaged.”

I gazed at him. There was no more expression in his face than in the pearl pin in his expensive-looking grey tie. What could he mean?

“I wish it to appear to everybody—to my family, to my acquaintances, to the people in this office—that I am actually engaged,” he explained. “I wish to find someone who, to outward appearances, could take the place of my fiancée; could go about with me, stay at my home, and be introduced all round as the girl I meant to marry. She must understand from the very beginning that it was absolutely a matter of business; that the so-called ‘engagement’ would terminate at the end of the year, and that there could be no possible question of its ending in marriage. If I found this lady, I would make it worth her while; paying her at the rate of ten pounds a week for her services. You follow me, Miss Trant?”

I began to “follow,” but I could scarcely believe that he really intended to carry out this mysterious scheme. It was more like the plot of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera than any “business” I’d ever heard of in real life. Still more incredible was what came next.

“It seemed to me from the first that the most suitable person for the post would be—yourself.”

“Me?” I echoed, aghast. Oh, this was getting out of comic opera, and into the realms of nightmare! Was he really suggesting that I——

“Yes; you, Miss Trant. You are a lady in every essential, if I may say so, of looks and manner. You seem to possess the gift of making yourself generally liked. You’re distinctly intelligent, in spite of your work, which is——” here for one instant a gleam of what looked almost like humour seemed to flash from the Governor’s eyes. But it was gone again so swiftly that I couldn’t be sure whether it had ever been there. I must have been mistaken. He went on imperturbably: “I am a very fair judge of character, and I believe you to be trustworthy. As a mark of my confidence in you, I shall pay into your account the whole sum of five hundred pounds so soon as you let me know that you consent to enter into this arrangement.”

“Five hundred pounds?” I echoed stupidly.

“Yes; that is payment for the entire year at the rate of ten pounds weekly. I hope you will see your way to accepting it. Think it over to-night, please,” said Still Waters, in his curtest, most business-like tone, “and let me have your answer here—if you can, that is” (meaning “you must!”) “at eleven-fifteen to-morrow morning. I need hardly tell you that this must remain strictly between ourselves. I think that’s all.”

He glanced at the round-topped mahogany clock above the fireplace, then put his hand out to the row of electric-bell pushes on his desk. Our interview was over.

“Good afternoon, Miss Trant.”

“Good afternoon,” I murmured rather feebly, as I retraced my steps over that long, long stretch of carpet to the door.

I felt furious with myself for lacking the ordinary pluck to tell the Governor then and there:

“I shan’t need to-night to think the question over. My answer is ‘No!’ I can’t possibly undertake such an arrangement.”

For how can I? How can I accept such an extraordinary position? “Officially” engaged to the Governor—the office tyrant, the mummy, the fault-finding automaton! Fancy “going about” with him, letting everyone imagine that I was actually going to marry him! Fancy playing that Gilbertian part, with no rouge and no fun and no footlights to carry me through it, in a “piece” that went on all day and every day! And fancy—this was almost the most appalling thought of all—fancy having to face all the other girls in the office.

Oh, impossible; quite impossible! I can’t do it. I must summon up all my courage and tell him so to-morrow.

“Well?” whispered Miss Robinson, from the next typing-table. “What did the graven image say? Was he a brute? Is it the sack? Or is he giving you another chance?”

“I think he means to give me another chance,” I murmured. (Such a chance!) “I am——”

“Talking, ladies!” broke in the warning. “Miss Trant, it’s generally you, I notice!”

And Mr. Dundonald’s voice brought back the bugbear that has haunted me since twelve this morning—the terror of being penniless and out of work once more.

Oh, if I could only attain to some job, some other job, that would bring me in that princely salary of ten pounds a week! Imagine the blessed relief, the security of knowing that one had five hundred pounds in one glorious, solid lump at one’s back. But then, imagine accepting the Governor’s terms before one earned it! Oh, no!

The bogey “out of work” haunted me down into the Tube lift, along the Embankment, all the way back up our grey Battersea street, with the red-faced pavement-artist who always touches his cap to me, smiles and points to his lurid chalk-drawing of a wreck with the legend: “Like the Artist—On the Rocks!”

“I’m on the rocks myself, Blossom. This is probably the last penny I shall be able to give you!” I told him, with a desperate little laugh.

Then I turned in at the entrance to Marconi Mansions, and climbed up our stone stairs to the cheap but cosy little top-flat which has for six months meant “Home” to us two bachelor girls.

How long should I be able to afford to share it?

CHAPTER III
THINKING IT OVER——

I always expect to be in long before Cicely Harradine, the girl who shares the place with me. We first made friends in a ten-shillings-a-week bedroom at the Twentieth Century Club, when she was left much as I was, a waif without any friends that counted, and with just a tiny lump of capital. This she used up in paying her fees at the Slade School of Art, where she’d gone, in her innocence, with a view to taking up fashion-drawing. They all used to say at home that she’d “a gift” for sketching, and she’d heard—we’ve all heard!—that there are fortunes to be made out of fashion-plates. Only she hadn’t realized that for a girl of her sort, lovely and good-hearted and “gormless,” there’s only one way of getting a fortune; namely, by marrying it. And how can you marry, as she often says plaintively, if you never even see any “possible” men? All the people she seems to see nowadays—besides Slade students—are the gorgeous Jewesses who deal at the “studio” where Cicely’s one real “gift” (that of a tall, willowy figure) is now turned to advantage by showing off the evening-frocks and opera-wraps of Madame Chérisette, in Bond Street, in the show-rooms she can seldom leave until well after seven o’clock.

So to-day I was astonished to find the second-hand, cretonne-covered couch in our sitting-room already occupied by what looked like a bundle of rugs, dishevelled red curls, and arnica bandages, whence proceeded the sound of dismal sobs.

“Cicely!” I cried, alarmed. “You back already? Why, what’s happened?”

“Oh, my dear, such an awful catastrophe!” wailed the voice of Cicely, while the willowy figure twisted itself into sitting up against our cheap flock cushions. “What do you think? When I went out to lunch this morning I managed to slip on a bit of banana-skin that some perfect pig had flung down at the crossing—No, Tots! it wasn’t those shoes I will wear, so you needn’t say that!—and I twisted my ankle and cut my head on the kerb, and I had to be brought home in a taxi, and the doctor’s been, and he says I’m to keep my foot up for a fortnight, and what—what on earth’s to become of my job?” wept Cicely. “Chérisette won’t take me on again, for there’s a girl waiting now for my place! A niece of somebody’s! She’ll snap it up! And what am I to do? Hurp, hurp!”

She could only sob, and I could only stroke her pretty, incompetent fingers.

“There’ll be that doctor to pay! And it’ll be the rent again in three weeks’ time! It’s always being the rent, in this place, Tots! It never was at home. And I haven’t got any money saved now that I’ve bought that bicycle for Saturday afternoons. Isn’t it perfectly awful? Hurp, hurp! Oh, girls at home who get doctors and dentists and washing and everything f-found for them, hurp! are so fond of envying girls who earn their own livings because it’s so free and independent—how can they? They wouldn’t want to earn their horrible livings if they only knew how ghastly it was as soon as you got ill and hadn’t anything but a few shillings between you and goodness knows!”

“‘Earned increment is sweet, but that unearned is sweeter,’” I quoted bitterly.

“Oh, you laugh at everything, Tots! This is serious. S-s-s-seven-and-sixpence! That’s all I’ve got left in the whole wide world! And you’ve nothing but your twenty-five bob a week!”

(Yes! I thought; and even that modest salary will be lost to me to-morrow. For when I tell the Governor that I find I can’t accept his offer, he’s pretty certain to sack me. After his allusion to my “work,” after Mr. Dundonald’s “warrrnings,” what else need I expect? But this wasn’t the moment to tell my poor, distracted chum my own bit of bad luck. Even if we were both out of work and on those rocks together, it must, for the present at least, be kept from her.)

“Now look here, don’t you worry,” I said, more cheerfully than I felt. “You know you’re no end of a ‘find’ as a mannequin, because you’ve got the voice that goes with the figure. It must be rather a shock when Madame’s clients ask something that looks like a young duchess in a dream of a gown ‘What did you say the price was?’ and get told in the accents of Whitechapel ‘Twenty-ite paounds, Madam!’ That’s the pull you’ve got, so you know you’re sure of another good place as soon as your foot’s right. Until then I—I can manage perfectly well for the two of us. What about something to eat? Mrs. Skinner coming back to cook to-night?”—Mrs. Skinner is supposed to “do” for us. I often think that, in another sense, she will!

“No. She’s off for the whole day to go to a funeral. You said she might, this morning.”

“So I did. I thought it was a week ago—it feels like it. Well, I’ll get supper.”

As I passed into our little dark cubby-hole of a kitchen, I saw something that I’d overlooked before—a letter left lying on the mat, as it had dropped through the letter-box. I picked it up. It was addressed to me. And at the sight of the thin foreign envelope and the South African stamp my heart sank even lower. I had a presentiment that I hadn’t come to the worst yet.

It was a letter from my brother in Cape Town; poor old ne’er-do-weel Jack, who scarcely ever writes anything more than a picture postcard with a view of the Cape of Good Hope, or something of that kind, unless he’s in trouble and wants something.

With a sigh I took out the crackling, scrawled sheet; and my eyes fell on the last sentences first.

“You’ll have to get the money for me, old girl. You know you can if you try. Ask Vandeleur to lend it to us; he’d do anything for you. Haven’t got his address, or I would have written to him myself. I am absolutely on the rocks, so don’t wait. You’ll have to wire a hundred pounds to the Bank here——”

A hundred pounds? Mightn’t he just as well have said “a million”? What was all this about? I took the letter into my own little room and sat down on the camp-bed to read it through....

In five minutes I have grasped all that I can take in at present of the situation; an old one.

Jack is in trouble, worse trouble than ever before. Debts; an I O U that was to fall due in six weeks. Threatened exposure of—something that he doesn’t explain. “A business affair?”

Yes; Mr. Dundonald is quite right. I have “no head for business routine.” My head’s going round with the bewilderment of it. It can’t mean that Jack, my own brother, Father’s only son—one of the Trants—has been “not quite straight” with the accounts that are in his care? He must be mad! It must be the hot sun in that awful country. Not Jack——!

But to suggest that I should turn to Sydney Vandeleur for the money, even supposing that I knew where the Vandeleurs were to be found just now—oh! As if I wouldn’t rather die! Yet there’s nothing else that I can do——

Stop. There is one thing.

For, as if flashed in letters of fire over the dim purple sky over the London roofs outside my window, I seem to see the words—

“FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS!”

And they mean, not only a solution of the difficulties of Miss Trant, typist, not only comforts and security for Cicely, the show-girl out of work, but the saving of our family name and honour from disgrace. Help instead of ruin for that poor dear weak-kneed broken reed of a brother of mine.

It’s Providence, that wildly eccentric scheme of the Governor’s. I don’t care what its object may be. I only know that now—now—I daren’t refuse to fall in with it. Never mind the details. The main fact is that I must have that hundred pounds, and this is the only way to it.

I’ve just taken supper into our sitting-room, and I’ve been able to smile quite recklessly down into the woe-begone, girlish face under the arnica bandages.

“Buck up, Cis, and eat some really good scrambled eggs with little bits of ham chopped up in them. And then there’s some glass loganberries, hot; and somebody’d been what Mrs. Skinner calls ‘pampering the milk,’ so I got a brown jar of cream for them. One comfort of living in a ménage without any men (a joke, so please laugh) is that we can eat what we like, instead of stodging horrible, gristly chops and steaks and potatoes every night of our lives. And I brought in some red ink—not Veuve Emu this time, but really decent Burgundy to cheer us up——”

“But, my dear—!” protested Cicely, with the scared glance of the business-girl who knows what it costs to eat and drink.

“It’s not extravagance. I can afford it.”

“You can’t! You can only just manage to scrape along for yourself—and you know your poor darling hat’s awful, and you told me you couldn’t get another—you haven’t managed to put by a penny for ‘extras’—you told me yesterday——”

“Ah, yesterday! But I shall have some more money—now.”

“What?—and you never told me when you came in? What, have Waters and Son actually given you a rise?”

“Supplementary duties,” I explained briefly, drawing a wooden chair up beside Cicely’s couch and laying a clean towel over it for a tablecloth before I set down the plate of ham-scramble. “Pretty well-paid, too. Yes. I got the job to-day. And,” I concluded with resolution, “I begin it to-morrow.”

CHAPTER IV
ACCEPTED!

“And when do you think the ‘engagement’ had better be announced? At once?”

This was what the Governor said to me this morning when I again presented myself at his desk; this time with the timid “acceptance” which, after poor Jack’s desperate appeal, is my only alternative.

“At once?” I gasped. “Oh, but—How could it? The—well—people would think it so”—I checked a hysterical laugh—“so funny!”

“Funny? What’s funny about it?” took up the Governor, as sharply as if he didn’t see anything at all odd in the whole situation. But he does. He must! What a hateful trick men have of pretending they’re not pretending—when you’re unable to prove, in so many words, that they are! People talk about women being more complicated; good gracious! It’s we who are simple and straightforward. What was I to make of the Governor, when he asked me, in quite an annoyed tone of voice, “I suppose men at the heads of offices have become engaged to their employees before now Miss Trant?”

“Y-yes—of course—Become engaged.”—He was talking now as if this were that!—“But not if——”

“Not if what?”

“Well, not if they have never seen them to speak to!” I explained falteringly. “You see, Mr. Waters, the three other typists in my room——”

“Oh! Those girls!” said Mr. Waters casually, and I caught my breath.

For in the tone of those two words from the Head of Affairs I heard the rest of his meaning—“If they think it odd—if they make difficulties, they can go, at once.”

I saw that nightmare threat of “the sack” looming again, this time over the heads of three girls who had worked with and always been very decent to me. They—if they stood the least bit in this young office tyrant’s way—could go!

“It’s not only the girls,” I urged, clenching my hands to keep them from shaking, and hating the man who made me so nervous. “It’s—everybody. Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander, they must all know that you scarcely exchanged a word with me until you sent for me yesterday, when we—they all thought you were going to dismiss me——”

“Ah?” said the Governor coolly.

“—S-so I can’t tell them, right on the top of that, that we are actually engaged to be married! There’ll have to be—some—some other sort of warning!”

“Don’t see the necessity myself,” said Still Waters, fixing those keen grey eyes upon me as if I were a letter-file or a paper-weight, or some other inanimate object that they’d happened to fall upon while he was meditating on other things. I wondered if he were thinking that, sooner than be bothered over this affair, he would sack Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander and his whole staff! “Still, if you prefer it. You mean that there had better be some intermediate stages; that I ought to begin by singling you out from the others, seeing more of you, and so on. Quite so.”

It was uncanny, the cut-and-dried way in which he spoke of proceedings which—well, are always looked upon as so intensely the opposite of cut-and-dried! This affair was the imitation of something very different; still, one hardly expected him to be able to map it all out, like the diagrams in scientific dressmaking!

“Now, how am I supposed to ‘see more’ of you?” he went on, in the same tone as he might have asked, “Where must I join this dotted line to section D?”

“Ah, I have it.” (The sections were beginning to fit in neatly.) “You will come into my room here each afternoon in Mr. Alexander’s place, and take down my letters.”

“Very well,” I agreed, relapsing into my usual outward meekness and inward rebelliousness.

What a fearful nuisance, to be banished to the Siberia of the Governor’s private room, after the murky but cheery atmosphere of the typists’ “glory-hole,” and the society of three other girls!

A couple of years ago I should have used the shibboleth of my set at home to describe these same girls—“Terrible!—Impossible!” I should have noticed nothing about them beyond their cheap “stock” clothes and the Cockney accents that used to be such an hourly jar to my nerves. I shouldn’t have differentiated the sentimental “Smithie” from Miss Robinson, who has more capacity in her carbon-stained little finger than most of the girls who were with me at Wycombe Abbey had in their heads. I should scarcely have considered them of the same race of being as myself, and as for being on friendly, talkative terms with them—Well, having to fend for oneself in the labour-market does knock a good deal of the nonsense out of one. Here I was, quite annoyed at the prospect of giving up the companionship of the three for the afternoons!

Still, it would be worth it. My employer would be as good as his word about the five hundred pounds. He’d open an account for me. And at lunch-time I shall be able to cable that much-needed hundred to Cape Town.

I’m to begin earning it as private clerk—to a living tape-machine!

“Yes. That will be quite the best plan,” he went on. “That will pave the way for it.” His tone became if anything more “scientifically diagrammatic” still as he said, “To-day is May fourteen; let me see—How long do you suppose it would take before it would be considered the natural thing for me to fall in love with you?”

“‘Natural’? How could it ever be considered natural” was on the tip of my tongue, “for you to fall in love with anybody?—You, who think it ought to be mapped out into a certain number of days, like that sum about ‘twenty reapers reaping so many acres in a week.’”

Primly I answered aloud, “I should think you could please yourself, Mr. Waters.”

“Well, we will see about that presently,” said my employer, turning to the desk. “And now there is this——” After speaking about “the time it took to fall in love,” I thought he’d reached his limit. But no. He went further.

From a drawer that he unlocked he took out a paper that he handed to me.

“I have taken the precaution of having our whole arrangement put down in black-and-white, if you will kindly sign it here.”

—“In black-and-white!”—“sign——!”

I felt the angry colour surging up into my face; I was all the more furious because I dare not show the real rage I was in.

“Oh, yes. I’ll sign it,” I said, with desperate meekness, “if you really think it’s necessary. If you imagine that I am the kind of girl who might take advantage of our—our contract afterwards, sue you for breach of promise, or——”

“Come, come!” Still Waters interrupted briskly, peremptorily. “It’s just because I didn’t think you were ‘that kind of girl,’ amongst other reasons, that I selected you for my post. This instrument is drawn up largely on your own account. You have a pen——?”

I took it out of the case fastened to the front of my very utilitarian blue delaine blouse. I hate wearing it there. I always look upon it as the sign of servitude and the mark of the beast, but it’s the custom—and business-like.

“Right. Now, Miss Trant, I think that’s all for this morning. You can arrange to come in and take down my letters each afternoon at a quarter to three, beginning to-morrow.”

“Yes,” I said, in my meekest tone.

Loud were the murmurs of commiseration that broke from my three friends in my own room when they heard of this novel arrangement.

“What, my dear? You to take down his old letters? That’s the Governor’s idea of giving you one more chance, I suppose,” sniffed Miss Robinson, “before he sacks you! Pity he didn’t tell you to go, and get it over yesterday!”

“He’s simply impossible to please. Why, when I come here first,” said Miss Holt, “he had had three girls at it in one week and they all came out in tears because the Machine had snapped their heads off. For one thing, he dictates at such a rate that I don’t know how he expects anyone to follow him without they have to ask him to repeat it, and then he glowers at you like a Gordian! See if he doesn’t!”

“It’ll be ‘Now, Miss Trant!’” mimicked Miss Robinson, gabbling at top-speed. “‘Got that? Go on—

“‘We can offer no further explanation of same beyond facts already supplied, and are of opinion that there is nothing to be gained by prolonging this correspondence.’ Certainly nothing to be gained by you, my poor dear!”

“No, he’ll be sending for that stolid Scotch Sandy back before the afternoon’s over!”

“Don’t discourage the girl too much before she starts. Still, I wish you weren’t forsaking our room for the afternoons, Miss Trant. We shall miss your merry prattle and your footstep on the stair.”

“Yes, and there won’t be much prattling for you in there,” said Miss Smith. “More like sitting among the mummies and sphinxes and things in the British Museum. Girls, can you imagine Still Waters ‘prattling’ to anybody, even as a little boy?”

“That man was never anything so human as a little boy,” declared Miss Robinson. “He was created grown-up and ready-made and put together like a Remington. Probably in the very act of clicking out—

“‘Contract B.954. Our buyers advise us as under,’ and so on.

“I wouldn’t mind what I betted that he never cried over going to school for the first time, or began to fancy himself more when he’d sat out at a dance and flirted——”

“Flirted! The Governor!” I put in—quite forgetting What would presumably be my cue very soon, and laughing with the others.

“You might just as well think of him falling really desperately in love with——”

“Talk-ing, ladies,” broke in the usual voice, followed by the usual lull.

But the usual twinge of fear didn’t visit me this time.

Let Mr. Dundonald report me; let him complain of me, bitterly, to the Governor if he likes! All Caledonia, stern and wild, can’t get me turned out of the Near Oriental now. To-morrow sees me unshakably installed as—the Governor’s private clerk!

I must say Mr. Waters is even more paralysingly alarming to work for in this capacity.

His dictation—Well! Miss Robinson described it. He simply doesn’t realize, doesn’t mean to realize, that “a clerk” is composed of anything more than a pad and a scurrying pencil. He literally does not see that these objects may be trembling in the grasp of the anxious slip of a young woman, who has to guide them! He’s excruciatingly particular about the transcribing of his sheaf of letters. And I shudder—that is, I should have shuddered only last week—to think what would happen to Miss Trant, typist, if she brought in anything to be signed one second after four-thirty, which is his time for leaving.

But now I’m secure in the knowledge that however much that machine of a young man with the closed cash-box of a mouth may long to sack me as a typist, my other, more lucrative, post could not be so easily filled.

Hurray!

To-day is Friday: that Day of Terror in the office, the day of the outward mails. But it’s brought no terror to me. My week’s salary, if you please, has amounted to eleven pounds, five shillings.

Twenty-five shillings of that was paid out to me in the usual way by Mr. Wallis, our cashier—little dreaming that my purse was already bulging with ten more than welcome sovereigns that I got in exchange for my own cheque (The grandeur of that!) at the Bank where that providential five hundred pounds (four hundred since) has been put down to the account of “Miss M. Trant.”

I daren’t allow myself to think what would have happened if it hadn’t been for that.

As it is, I am able to take home quite a lot of invalid dainties to Cicely (left to the tender mercies of Mrs. Skinner) as well as a lovely lemon-coloured azalea in a pot, and a brand-new novel (four-and-six—half her share of the house-keeping money!).

Spending this fortune will come fatally easily to me, I know. But I’ve a dim presentiment that the earning of it isn’t going to be as easy as that!

This morning, which now seems about a year since I began my “supplementary duties,” Harold summoned me to appear at twelve o’clock, instead of after lunch, before the Governor.

First of all I was seized with nervous flurry, wondering what on earth I’d done. Then I remembered that it wouldn’t really matter about that. What mattered was what I should have to do next?

There was another cut-and-dried plan for this in the very tone of the Governor’s “Good morning” when he glanced up to see me standing submissively beside his desk again.

“Now, Miss Trant, you have been working in here exactly a fortnight,” he reminded me.

“Exactly a fortnight.” I wonder if he is going to keep count of every one of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year which must elapse before I shall be able to say a gleeful good-bye to him and his diagrammatic “engagement?” I expect so: I expect there’s a time-table for each one, drawn up and carefully put away for reference in one of the locked drawers of his big cleared desk.

“I think that something more might be done at once about this arrangement of ours.”

“Oh, yes?”

(A fortnight! Neither too long nor too short a time, he probably considered, for some “fresh development” to take place.)

“So what about my taking you out to lunch to-day?”

What about it? A vivid mental picture of the expression on the faces of Miss Robinson, Miss Holt and Smithie rose before me. What—what would they look like when——Well! They’ve got to look it sooner or later, so it might as well begin to-day.

“Certainly,” I nearly said. Then I hesitated. No! Why should he be able to “fit in” every single detail of his plans, with the ease of a born jig-saw genius? Why shouldn’t he have to make some rearrangement, consult someone else’s convenience for once in his life? I would just try to put my tiny little spoke in his wheel here, to see.

“Mr. Waters, would you mind making it to-morrow instead?”

“Much the same to me,” returned my employer rather unexpectedly—still, I suppose he would allow a twenty-four hours’ margin in these arrangements, in case of accidents. “But why wait?”

“Oh, because”—No woman ever does anything for one unadulterated motive; a thing men won’t understand! So I had my second choice of reasons quite ready, and it was quite naturally, as well as truthfully (for I was thinking of Smithie’s preparations for an outing), that I suggested—“it would seem more ‘natural’ if I were to have on a new—my best hat to go out to lunch in instead of the little old cap I put on because of this drizzle to-day.”

“Ah! Very well,” said Mr. Waters, with his succinct nod. He added, “I suppose that sort of thing is what they mean when they say—when women say—that women have a much better eye to detail in business than men have?”

(I don’t quite know how he meant that. But never mind, Mr. Cut-and-Dried. I have altered your time-table by a day, at least!)

“To-morrow, then,” said Mr. Waters, after I had said “Is that all?” And I went.

The next day was a regular “new-hat” day. Just the sort of day to go out to lunch with a “hovering” fiancé—a real one!—I thought, as I set off down the Embankment, leaving Cicely, whose foot isn’t quite right even yet, at the open sitting-room window with a novel.

It was brightly sunny, but, although we’re nearly in June now, there was a nip of cold in the breeze; the smile of a flirt—of a “cold coquette,” as Major Montresor described me once. I wonder what he’d think if ever he met me again? Probably that it was just like little Monica to “pull off” making a good match with another froggy-natured person.

I laughed at this as I was walking along to the corner where I get the motor-bus. After all, there’s nothing to do but laugh at it—at the whole affair. Actually, it was a momentous choice to have thrust upon any girl; and it might have cruelly embarrassing side-issues. But what’s the good of dwelling on momentous and cruel aspects of subjects that have a comic side to them? The only way is to look hard at that comic side—to see the joke, the whole joke, and, most important of all, nothing but the joke.

I felt satisfactorily strung up to the coming “fun” of the situation when I got into the typists’ dressing-room at the Near Oriental.

Here I found Miss Holt listening to Miss Smith, evidently a little headachy and nervous, attempting to “stand up” to Miss Robinson in some argument.

“The matter with you,” she was saying pettishly, “is that you’re setting up to be a man-hater!”

“Setting up? No such luck,” said Miss Robinson, maddeningly good-tempered. “If I could ever see a fellow I didn’t think was awful, I’d begin thinking of setting up. But where are all the men, good gracious? What does a girl ever see, working in holes of offices? Weeds! Indoor weeds, smelling of stale Virginians and wearing Number Thirteen collars.”

“Collars aren’t anything!” Miss Smith flushed an angry pink.

“No; but what they go round are. And I must say I like to see a chap with a good, thick, strong-looking one (that’s why all the nice girls love a sailor, Smithie) with plenty of sunburn and no spots on it, and—Hul-lo, Miss Trant!”

I had turned up at the right moment to prevent a squabble—I and my brand-new hat bought out of Chérisette’s window, no less! and provided by the princely salary.

“I say, Miss Trant, my child, you’re blossoming out!” commented Miss Holt, all eyes and envy. “How much did that roof cost you? It’s a good one.”

“It is rather a good one,” I admitted quietly. “I’m so glad you like it.”

But I said no more until the morning’s work was over and we had trooped back into the dressing-room to get ready for going out at one o’clock. Then:

“I can’t come to lunch to-day,” I said, drawing on the deliciously “fresh”-feeling white gloves I’d bought for myself at the same time as the hat, and giving a glance round the dressing-room to make sure that they all took in the next announcement. “I’m going out.”

“Who with?” seemed to burst, of its own accord, from three pairs of lips at once.

Drawing myself up to what there is of my full height, I smothered an inclination to giggle foolishly, and answered with starchy dignity, “Since you must know, I’m going out to lunch with Still Waters.”

“Oh, my dear, give that old joke a rest,” urged the most frequent user of “the old joke,” Miss Smith, flushing anew with interest, “and tell us who HE is! This is something quite new, Miss Trant, isn’t it? Doesn’t she look conscious, girls? Didn’t I know that hat meant something? How exciting! I’m so glad, dear; but, do tell us! Not his name, of course——”

For in the code of these girls, it’s not fair to ask for names.

“—but just his Christian name!”

“William,” I admitted, smiling as “coyly” as I could.

“William! Sounds a bit—stand-offish,” objected Miss Holt. “D’you call him ‘Billy,’ by any chance?”

“Never,” I said solemnly, “not by any chance.”

“Of course not. ‘Billy’s’ no class,” said Miss Robinson. “‘William? Ahem! William!’” in a pompous bass voice. “Dark or fair, Miss Trant?”

“Fair.”

“M’m. Well, I suppose Miss Trant would pick a fair one, her being such a reel brunette,” commented Miss Holt, “but as for me, I never could take to a fair man. Puts me in mind of weak tea. About as fair ’s the Governor, Miss Trant?”

“Ye-es; just about.”

“Anything for a bit of a change,” said Miss Robinson satirically. “I should have thought you’d have liked another colour to sit opposite to at lunch, after having to have the same sort of thing staring you in the face all the afternoon. However!—no accounting for ’em!... I hope he’s tall, though?”

“Over six foot, I should think.”

“Ah! Well grown, William! Is the young gentleman in the City, may I ask?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Isn’t she a good sort, answering all our impertinent questions like this! One more, Miss Trant, and we won’t bother you. Where are you going to meet him?”

I don’t think she expected that I would answer this. But I said quite frankly, “I am to meet him just outside the front entrance in Leadenhall Street.” And I whisked out of the room to the lift. I didn’t tell the girls “Look out of that window on the other side of the landing and you’ll see him.”

I knew it wasn’t necessary.

In two minutes’ time I was being helped into a taxi by the august hand of our Governor himself.

I lifted my head and looked straight up at the landing window. Yes, there they were, all three of them, flattening their noses against the pane. I nodded and smiled with bravado. My three colleagues were too utterly taken by surprise to even smile back at me. The expression on their three faces was even more pronounced than as I had foreseen it. Miss Holt was standing in front, and as we drove away I saw her eyebrows rise to her netted hair, while her mouth dropped open.

I could almost hear the gasp that came from it, of:

“Girls! Did you ever? She really is!—with Still Waters! Well! What ever next?”

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LUNCH TOGETHER

“To the Carlton,” ordered Mr. Waters; and off we drove.

I hadn’t been inside the Carlton since the days before the “smash”—the days when I was a young lady of leisure, without an idea that I should presently be toiling in the grimy typists’ room at the Near Oriental from nine o’clock until six, wearing home-made delaine shirts, and trembling lest I might lose my hard-earned twenty-five shillings a week!

The last time I’d been taken there to tea, after a matinée, by my brother Jack and Sydney Vandeleur, who had ordered roses of a very special pink to match the frock I’d worn then, and had sent a message to the band to play my favourite waltzes. Yes, as Jack said, Sydney would do anything for me, always. I expect Jack thought that the hundred pounds which saved his name came, as he suggested, from the Vandeleurs. Well, I couldn’t possibly “give away” the truth about the anomalous position his sister accepted in order to earn the money!

Thank goodness, the Vandeleurs were at the other end of the world, and wouldn’t be home for a year, thought I. By then my time would be up, and they needn’t know of my make-believe “engagement”—except that it was “broken off”!

“I telephoned for a table,” said Mr. Waters, as we left the ordinary work-a-day world of hurrying people and crowded, petrol-breathing motor-buses in the Haymarket, and entered the restaurant—warm, perfumed, bright with dainty clothes and pretty faces that smiled above the little tables.

Ours was in a delightfully cosy corner, next to an empty table reserved for three persons. The decorations were of pink hothouse roses, almost the same as Sydney’s! How very different from that marble-topped table in the crowded “Den of Lyons” above which Miss Robinson, Smithie and little Miss Holt were probably even now gossiping excitedly over this event; but how much rather I would have been with them!

“Now, Miss Trant, what do you prefer for lunch?”

(My only variation of lunch for the last year having been from “Bovril and a baked apple” to “Poached-egg-on-toast, with a glass of hot milk.”)

“I don’t mind at all.”

“Then I’ll order.”

And very delicious were the things he did order. Apparently even a machine liked perfect bisque de homard, and crisp whitebait—his one touch of nature, in fact.

I longed for Cicely—who does love nice food, poor child!—to be there to help me enjoy this. In fact, I wished that Cicely and I could have had the lunch to our two gossiping selves. How we should have enjoyed all the luxuries, from the pretty glass to the freedom to chat, softly but unrestrainedly, about everyone we noticed in the place. I have heard it said that “Women would rather talk to other women than to men, even when they would rather talk to a man than to a woman.” I don’t think I’ve often met any single man I’d rather talk to than to a fairly amusing member of my own sex. You have to say most things twice to men, and then they don’t really understand....

Still Waters, of course (as his typists explain to each other at least four times in a morning), isn’t what you could call a man. Somehow, in surroundings that used to be more familiar to me than offices and City streets, I lost a little of that awe-struck nervousness of my employer. For a time I could almost forget he was that. He became—Well! he made me feel as I did in the old days when I had got someone very heavy-in-hand to take me in to dinner, or as if I were sitting out a dance with some rather hopeless partner. I mean that was about as far as any conversation between us went—a few stilted, distrait remarks, punctuating long stretches of silence.

Meanwhile, I glanced round the big place at the other luncheon-parties, people laughing and chatting together—out evidently for amusement, not “business”!

Several times I caught glances directed at our own table. I wondered what the people were thinking of us—of the enormously tall, fair young man with “City” stamped all over him, from his smooth head to his glossy boots, and the small, dark-eyed girl in the black velours hat which looked so very much more expensive and stylish than her neatly-cut but ancient serge costume would lead them to expect.

Perhaps they thought that the big young man with the face as expressionless as a fireproof curtain was slightly bored by taking his country cousin round the sights of London? Perhaps they thought we were really engaged? It didn’t matter. There was no one in the restaurant who knew either of us. Idly I wondered who would come in and take the “reserved” table close to us.

“Miss Trant, you took good care that the other typists knew for a fact with whom you were coming out?”

“Oh, yes. They were all looking out of the landing window as we drove off.”

“Good!” said Still Waters.

And again I almost fancied that I caught that flash of something like humour in his granite-grey eyes, as I’d fancied it before, when he spoke about my “intelligence” and my work. But again it was gone before I could make sure. I was glad. One doesn’t want a machine to have any sense of humour. And I shouldn’t find it so easy and unembarrassing to be on terms of “official fiancéedom” with anything but a machine.

“I shall take you out to lunch two or three times this week,” he announced, in his orders-for-the-day voice, “and perhaps to tea. On Saturday I shall ask you to come with me to a matinée that you can talk about, and so on, to the others.”

“Very well, Mr. Waters,” I said meekly.

“And now that we’ve led up to it in this way, I see no point in waiting. So next week, Miss Trant, the ‘engagement’ had better be announced.”

“Certainly,” I agreed, again picturing to myself the stupefaction of everybody at the Near Oriental, from Mr. Dundonald (a pity the shock can’t incapacitate him for life!) down to Harold.

At home there’d be Cicely. I’m fond of her, but I dread this. She takes such an exasperating interest in anything that can be called a love-affair. I myself can’t see what there is so thrilling about “Who is going to marry whom, and why?”

But Cicely positively “collects,” just as some people collect book-plates, all she can find out on this hackneyed subject. I know she’ll insist on treating this arrangement between my employer and myself as a real, romantic “affaire de cœur.” Well, I suppose I shall have to keep from slapping her!

Then there’ll be Mr. Waters’ friends, whoever they are, to whom I shall have to be introduced as the girl he’s going to marry. (Oh, lor’! as Mrs. Skinner puts it.)

“After which,” pursued the Governor, “I think I shall have to ask you to——What is it, Miss Trant? Just seen somebody you know?”

“Yes,” I managed to murmur; “I know the lady who has just come in—at the next table.”

For at the table which had been reserved for three, two of the party had just turned up.

One was a fair-haired young girl, expensively frocked in blue velvet, but still looking like school-room tea. The other—how well I knew the slim, well-preserved silhouette of her figure, the carefully-graded bloom of her face!

It was Lady Vandeleur, whom I’d imagined to be in Japan!

She is a charming woman, but she has two faults. One is that, with a son of thirty-two, she insists on remaining twenty-five. The other is that, unlike dear old Sydney, to whom the downfall of the Trant fortunes made absolutely no difference, she’s never really liked me since the “smash.”

Before that, she was quite eager to explain that I was “already” like a young daughter to her. But it’s two years since I heard the tone of effusive affection with which Sydney’s mother was speaking to the girl beside her.

“My dear child, aren’t you starving? I vote we begin. That naughty boy of mine is so late. We really can’t wait for Sydney!”

“For Sydney!” Goodness! Then presently Sydney himself would join them. He would take the chair that faced our table—to which his mother sat with her back turned. He would see me—he’d be sure to come across and speak!

My mind was in a whirl of wondering what Sydney Vandeleur would think when he saw the girl he admired lunching tête-à-tête at the Carlton with that big, imperturbable stranger. And then Sydney himself came in.

I was in the middle of a particularly ambrosial pêche Melba, and anyone would have thought I didn’t raise my eyes from it. But thank goodness, my eyelashes are long enough for the purpose they’re given a girl—to be looked up through, without a man seeing. In a flash I’d taken in all of Sydney that one could see; his general appearance of a Cavalier’s portrait; his look at the girl, his mood, a slightly different way he’d had his hair (longish) and his little Vandyke beard trimmed since I saw him last, the clothes he was wearing....

Of course nine girls out of ten never notice a man’s ordinary clothes. Evening-dress they recognize; and, of course, flannels, because those are white, and allow the man (especially after a hard game) to look a decent shape if he is one. Anything else is lost on them. But I’m the tenth girl. As Major Montresor once said, when he was huffy with me for telling him his new Norfolk jacket was “too undergraduatey” for him, “Little Monica notices like a valet!”

Sydney’s clothes one couldn’t help noticing; he’s so well-turned-out, but never in a stereotyped style; in fact, he refuses to be dressed, as he calls it, “through a stencil.” I’m sure he’d rather put on a false nose and walk down St. James’s Street in it than appear in that hideous conventional “rig” of the Governor’s. To-day, for the Carlton, Sydney wore grey of such an exquisite soft stuff that it was hard to believe it came from any ordinary man’s tailor; the tie below his bare throat was dove-colour shot with heliotrope, and his silk socks and the line in his shirt with its soft collar matched it exactly. There was one dark Russian violet in his button-hole.

All these details were familiar to me before Sydney so much as cast a glance at our table. Then, in a lull, when I refused coffee, he seemed to prick up his ears. With a quick turn from the girl in blue velvet, he looked straight across and saw me at last.

“Monica——!”

I heard the quick, delighted, recognizing exclamation break from my old admirer’s lips. (I know he admires me, so why not say so?)

For the life of me, I couldn’t help raising my eyes and meeting his own fixed upon me.

He half rose. Then his glance fell upon my companion. Mr. Waters was then in the act of putting money down upon the little tray the waiter handed.

And then I saw the expression of eager delight on Sydney’s dark, rather dreamy-looking, face give place to a hurt surprise, as he sat back again in his chair.

At the same moment Lady Vandeleur turned quickly, fixing her own gaze upon our table.

Immediately the gaze became a blank stare, while her exquisitely-pencilled eyebrows rose almost to the edge of her costly “transformation.” She’d recognized me, of course. But stony displeasure and outraged convention gleamed in the eyes that she instantly averted.

You see, in her world a girl of my age is not supposed to lunch at the Carlton without a chaperon of some sort, and with an unspecified young man.

Up to this occasion I, Colonel Trant’s daughter, had been of that world, of those conventions. The Vandeleurs were evidently shocked at the lapse.

Dear old Sydney, old-fashionedly chivalrous towards women, was also old-fashionedly strict; and his mother—well! she was merely glad of the excuse to cut me.

Under the circumstances I need not have minded. But one is not consistent. I minded horribly the idea of what they might be thinking about me—that I had become horrid, forward, fast.

Something that seemed as hard and hot as a baked paving-stone seemed to settle between my chest and my throat as I fumbled at the last button of my long white gloves, and, in answer to Mr. Waters’ business-like “Ready, Miss Trant?” I rose to follow him out.

Lady Vandeleur’s tortoiseshell-handled lorgnette rose also. I saw her turn a searching scrutiny upon my blond, glossily-groomed, well-to-do looking escort.

Again a horrible hint of what she might be thinking of me passed through my mind. She knew I worked now in the City; she would think—Sydney would think—I had made it an excuse for “picking up” the attentions of a wealthy business-man, perhaps my employer. From every point of view it is considered “bad form” for the head of a firm to have anything to say to his typist out of business-hours.

All this she would say to Sydney, and to that girl. No, I couldn’t stand that! There seemed only one thing in the world for me to do. “I’m forced into it,” I thought rapidly, “so here goes.”

I touched Mr. Waters’s sleeve, murmuring:

“Please wait a moment.”

He stopped, looking down at me inquiringly. I turned, smiling, to that slim, expensively-gowned figure of outraged propriety at the other table. I accosted her as if I thought she had not seen me.

“Lady Vandeleur, don’t you know me?”

My own voice sounded strangely artificial in my ears, but, thank goodness, it was steady enough, with every syllable distinct.

“Will you allow me to introduce Mr. Waters, my fiancé?”

There! It was said!

Transformation scene upon that carefully-preserved face at the table! Gone, vanished, was the icy displeasure. A radiant smile, a gracious bow to the imperturbable Mr. Waters met my announcement. An effusive clasp of both my own hands.

“My dear child, what surprising, what delightful news! How glad I am for you,” cooed Lady Vandeleur.

How glad she was for herself—glad to think that a hopelessly ineligible girl, for whom Sydney had always displayed a regrettable weakness, was now safely out of harm’s way—and his!

Her gratification at this made her quite as affectionate as she had been in the days when the Trant family was still worth marrying into.

“So long since we heard anything of you, you naughty child! But this quite makes up. Yes, we were away; but there were alterations in our plans”—with a quick gesture, a quick glance, towards the pretty débutante opposite to her, evidently her latest “plan” for Sydney. “Now we are back in town for the season. The old address, you know, in Belgrave Square. Wednesday is my afternoon. Now, promise you will come and see us. A ‘soon’ Wednesday, mind! Do bring your fiancé!”

“I shall be delighted.” It was the Governor’s imperturbable voice that answered her. At that moment I could not have spoken.

For as Sydney was murmuring conventional congratulations I had caught sight of the look in his eyes. They are handsome eyes, deep and brown and soft, like the eyes of some spaniels; and just then they looked so bitterly hurt that I felt as if I had been cruel to some nice dog or some helpless child. Perhaps Sydney cared more than I had ever imagined.

I felt quite miserable when at last the purring farewells and the “so very glad, dear childs” were left behind us, and we passed out of the restaurant, through the wheeling glass doors into the Haymarket once more.

As we walked up to Piccadilly Circus I turned to the Governor with the apologies I felt I owed him.

“I’m so very sorry, Mr. Waters! There seemed nothing else to be done. Those people—they were old friends of my father’s; they would have thought it so odd for me to be lunching alone with you.”

“Oh, quite so, quite so!” put in the Governor, matter-of-fact and reassuring. “I quite realized the situation.”

Did he?

Not all of it! Poor Sydney! I have never felt nearer the possibility of falling in love with Sydney in my life. But the Governor was still speaking.

“In fact, I was not at all sorry that the occasion happened to come up. It means, of course, that the announcement will have to be made rather earlier.”

“Oh, yes,” I agreed, with the usual sinking of the heart.

We had reached the Circus now, and before I knew what he was going to do, Mr. Waters had stepped quickly across to those sailor-hatted, shawled flower-women, whose baskets make such a gorgeous splash of colour against the stone background of the fountain.

Back he came with a cluster of great red, fragrant carnations, which he handed to me.

“Oh, but really you should not have——” I was beginning, when I realized that this also was part of the business—that never had flowers been offered from man to maid under quite such unromantic circumstances before, and that I had better take Still Waters’ gift as ostentatiously as I could.

I tucked the sweet crimson blooms into the breast of my blue serge coat.

As we whizzed citywards in a taxi, the Governor spoke again.

“Now, Miss Trant, there is another suggestion I have to make to you,” he began. “To begin with, if I may say so, I like the way you dress.”

Crisp, concise, business-like syllables; no girl could have interpreted them into a compliment!

“I like the way you go to business—always neat, always ladylike. No ear-rings, no dingle-dangles and low necks like some of them; always a very clean collar and a quiet tie, I notice—just the thing for the office. But when I take you out rather more, I suppose you will have to have one or two rather special evening gowns and afternoon frocks, and theatre-wraps, and so on. I don’t know what they’re called. No doubt you know the kind of thing to order. All part of the arrangement, you understand. I’ll get a friend of mine in the City, whose wife runs a really first-class dressmaking business, to let me have the address; and then you will go to her—”

All cut-and-dried, like all his other schemes! But this was something different—very different as well.

—“have yourself fitted out with all that is necessary, and send in the bills to me.”

“Please, no. Not that,” I heard myself say quickly.

My employer turned upon me a face with some of the imperturbability quite jerked out of it by surprise.

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t mind, I can’t—I would rather not do so as you suggest about that,” said I, holding my head very high, but feeling myself turn as crimson as the flowers in my coat, and speaking rather shakily, for this was the first time I had ever asserted my own feelings in even the mildest way before him. “I—I know it seems like straining at a gnat after all the camels that I am preparing to swallow. Of course I will get the frocks and things. Only—please, you must allow me to pay for them out of my allowance—my salary.”

He looked at me doubtfully.

“That seems scarcely fair—to you. It means paying out your own money on things, that—well! I thought that would obviously come out as ‘business expenses.’”

I said, feeling miserably uncomfortable, “Don’t you see that I can’t possibly allow you to pay for—to give me frocks?”

“But—don’t you understand that—in the way of business, you will have to allow me to give you other things?”

“Other things? What?”

“Why, presents. I don’t know what, exactly. You will probably have to come round the shops with me yourself, and tell me. You are the best judge of what a girl would like to show, as gifts, keepsakes, what-nots, from the man to whom she is, presumably, engaged. It is part of this affair!” explained Mr. Waters, a little impatiently, as the taxi was held up at a crossing and waited panting for the signal to get on. “It would ‘look odd,’ as you yourself expressed it once, if I did not offer you presents.”

“Presents,” I said, feeling really indignant with him for being so obtuse, “are very different. For one thing, I should not have to keep them always. They would go back to you at the end of the year, as soon as that paper I signed for you is torn up. But—girls don’t take clothes as presents, ever!”

“I don’t see why not,” he said obstinately. “Besides—don’t they! A cousin of my own, a girl” (fancy his having a girl-cousin!) “who was staying with us last winter used to wear a magnificent stole and a muff of leopard-skin—the leopards had been shot by her fiancé.”

“Those were furs,” I explained. “Furs are different.”

“A great many things would seem to be ‘different’ from what I imagined,” he said, in a tone of voice that was almost petulant. I felt inclined to say, “Yes! You imagined that because you’re as infallible as a tape-machine in business-hours, you can’t make mistakes outside the office!”

Whereas Sydney Vandeleur, who has no “business” outside his amateur art criticism, with an occasional design for hand-wrought jewellery, would never have made the faux pas this man had done. It was so absurdly ignorant and gauche of him not to see it. And even now he seemed inclined to dispute the point.

“Feathers, now,” he said a little satirically. “Might not a girl wear a couple of really good, expensive ostrich plumes, or whatever you call them—the things that hang down the back like a sort of Niagara of fluff—if they were sent to her by a man with facilities for buying direct from South Africa?”

“Oh, yes,” I said readily, feeling as if I were an editress answering “Queries on Etiquette.” “Feathers are quite as permissible as furs.”

“Even supposing them to be very costly? Worth as much, say, as five times the amount of the rest of the lady’s wardrobe?”

“It’s nothing to do with the cost,” I explained patiently. “A twenty-guinea fox stole a girl might accept from a man. A four-pound frock she couldn’t.”

“I confess I don’t understand these nuances,” said Mr. Waters, almost absent-mindedly.

I said, “Any girl would.”

“Possibly. I can’t help wondering what held good instead of the fur-and-feathers edict in the days when they composed——What I was going to say,” he broke off quickly, “was that I always imagined that young French girls were brought up to be more strict in these matters than English ones. Yet I know a French girl—”

(Surprising! He knows a girl!)

—“her father’s an old business acquaintance of mine—”

(Ah, that explains it.)

—“and neither her father nor the young lady seemed to find anything curious about the matter, when, in payment of some bet made at a flying-meeting, I bought her quite a large boxful of pairs of gloves.”

“Oh, gloves! Anybody can give gloves to anybody,” I told him. “Gloves aren’t like clothes.”

“No, but I see some clothes about nowadays that are uncommonly like gloves!”

Could it have been the Governor who muttered this sotto voce to himself?

No! It must have been the comment that flashed through my own mind, and that I imagined spoken aloud as the burly policeman whose back I had been studying during this interlude dropped his hand and allowed our taxi to whizz forward into the writhing tangle of traffic.

There was no further stopping or talking until at last we reached the imposing entrance of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency offices.

I noticed that the Governor’s level eyebrows rose a trifle as he looked at the indicator of the fares before paying the driver. Yes, I am sure that many fifteen shillings’ worth of taxi-drive haven’t seemed as long. I only hope this florin’s worth was as endless to him as it was to me!

Then, just as I was turning away, my employer surprised me by saying brusquely but quite nicely, “Miss Trant, you must do just as you like in the matter of—of which we’ve been speaking. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I am sorry if I did—You understand that?”

“Oh, of course,” I said, all meekness again.

And then I set my teeth before I ran up the stairs into the typists’ dressing-room and prepared to face the eyes of my three friends, Miss Robinson, Miss Holt and Miss Smith.

CHAPTER VI
WHAT THEY SAID

In the dressing-room, where Miss Robinson was rinsing out the sooty basin before washing her hands in it, Miss Holt “smarming” her hair-net down over her little brown chocolate of a head, and Miss Smith tearing yet another leaf out of the inevitable book of papiers poudrés, the silence that met me was quite as death-like as if the girls had just been pulled up by Mr. Dundonald’s “Talk-ing, ladies!”

Talking? I didn’t need to be told that, from the moment they’d seen, out of the landing window, the last of that taxi in which the Governor and his private clerk had driven off, to the moment they had heard my returning footstep on the stairs, they had done nothing but talk about me and my incredible, my epic lunch.

As I drew the hat-pins from the admired new hat, I prepared for a hurricane of comments and questions.

None came. Not one of the girls seemed to have a word to say to me!

Perhaps they thought they would hear more by seeming not too eager. (That’s rather Miss Robinson’s style of “drawing out” her companions.)

Perhaps they considered the subject too vast for immediate discussion. Perhaps, for they are all good-natured girls, they had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t fair to “rag” me about it—that I might be feeling too utterly nervous and flurried over the unexpected (?) event.

They didn’t even ask me whether I had enjoyed myself! I even saw them, distinctly, avoid looking at me.

Only Miss Holt’s eyes seemed drawn, as if in spite of herself, to the flowers I was taking out of my coat to put in water in the grimy jam-jar on the dressing-table that so often holds Smithie’s bunch of violets; and it was Miss Holt who breathed an involuntary—

“I say, what lovely carnations!”

“Do have some,” I said, as a matter of course, dividing the cluster and holding out half to her.

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t deprive you for the world, Miss Trant,” murmured Miss Holt, stiffly drawing back.

I realized from her tone that she considered I had made a mistake.

Of course! Those flowers ought to have been thought “too precious” to share with anybody. Smithie would never think of giving one of her “boy’s” violets away. Dear me, I thought, what an added bore, having to remember to keep up the correctly sentimental attitude about every trifle of this kind.... Ah!

I broke off what I was thinking at that moment with quite a sudden start.

For, just as she turned away, I had caught Miss Smith’s glance at that cluster of fresh, crimson carnations. It might have been a bunch of withered wall-flowers that had been left too long in water, for the disgusted wrinkle that lifted the prettiest typist’s small, powdered nose.

“I wouldn’t touch them,” it seemed to say.

“Not those flowers.” ...

And at last I saw why.

The reason my three colleagues had forborne to question, or chaff, or even look at me when I came in from that expedition with the Governor was not because they were too considerate, too puzzled, or too wily.

It was merely because they were shocked—scandalized!

They were thinking worse things of me than I thought I saw behind Lady Vandeleur’s lifted lorgnette. I found myself suspected—probably more than suspected!—of having run counter to the standards of a class which is perhaps more innately virtuous than Lady Vandeleur’s and my own and Cicely’s, and certainly more rigid in its judgments. I remembered gossip about typists and their employers, gossip from the days when I was taking my training at Pitman’s. And out of this I could imagine for myself the tone of the talk about me that had passed across that marble-topped table in the “Den of Lyons” at lunch-time.

“Well, Still Waters have been running deep, with a vengeance! This is the meaning of her taking down his letters for a whole fortnight—without any complaints, girls! We might have seen there was something funny in that!”

“She’s been pretty artful, too, not letting on that there was anything at all, until to-day!—And there must have been some sort of beginning. A girl’s boss doesn’t take her out to a swagger lunch, with flowers and a new hat and all, without there’s been some sort of a leading up to it!”

Perhaps Miss Robinson might suggest—“Well, I should never have thought she’d been that kind of girl. Fact of the matter is, I suppose she funked losing her job if she didn’t.”

But Smithie and Miss Holt would chorus vehemently, “She ought to have lost her job, first! I would!—And chance it!”

Yes; according to this jury of maidens, I was already pronounced “Guilty.”

And, innocent as I was of anything they would have thought “mattered” in the least—for I don’t think the keeping-up of a false engagement would have outraged their conventions at all in comparison—I felt myself turn hot and cold with shame over the false position.

I was even thankful not to have to stay in the same room with these other girls that afternoon—thankful to be able to beat a retreat to the large, light office where I took down letters from the Governor’s rapid dictation as if my whole life depended on it—thankful that he did make such claims on the whole of my attention and capabilities; thankful that the boring “dinner-partner,” who had allowed a glimpse of a slightly more human personality in the cab when he’d discussed the difference between frocks and furs, had been entirely swallowed up again in the business-employer.

As he was leaving, he gave me the last of his orders for the following day.

“I should be glad if you would have lunch with me again to-morrow.”

“Very well, Mr. Waters.”

That means another ordeal in the dressing-room, where the ill-ventilated atmosphere will again be set simmering with the unspoken—and the unspeakable. I never did think that this ten pounds a week was going to be exactly easy to earn. But I hadn’t bargained for this—This is outrageous! It makes me hate everybody: Mr. Waters, to begin with, for making the proposal; Jack next, for making it necessary for me to accept it; the girls at the office here, for so hideously misconstruing the position!

My ordinary work, which had for two or three hours pushed my complicated “supernumerary duties” to the back of my mind, has come to an end, and the other thing looms well into the foreground again. I’ve walked nearly all the way back to Battersea, but that hasn’t worked off my simmering indignation even yet.

I shall spend the evening ironing out washing-ribbon and oddments in our tiny kitchen; I can’t stay with Cicely—I should only snap at her, and she would wonder why.

The one relief that I have been able to give to my feelings was when, in crossing the bridge, I tore those glorious crimson carnations (which I wouldn’t leave at the Near Oriental!) out of my coat again, and flung them far, far down into the sluggish brown waters of the river below me. How soon they were out of sight! How I wish that I could put them and everything connected with them, out of mind!

To-day, the day of my second lunch with Mr. Waters, has been one that I don’t think I shall ever forget, even when I’m a white-haired maiden-lady, with no one to lunch with but a parrot or a tabby-cat, and no man’s “appointments” to consult but those of the individual who has to pay me over my Old Age Pension!

Silence—a silence that ought to have rejoiced the heart of Mr. Dundonald, reigned throughout the whole long morning. I knew that the girls meant me to realize that Miss Trant, for outraging the code of the self-respecting business-girl, had been “sent to Coventry.”

This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For I flung it down like a gauntlet.

It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy “Gracious!”

The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat, fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie and Miss Holt were probably thinking.

“Miss Trant! D’you mind me asking you if you’re going out with Mr. Waters because you like it, or because you can’t say ‘No’?”

“Who would say ‘No’”—I fenced flippantly—“to a Savoy lunch?”

“Some girls might,” murmured Miss Smith. Miss Robinson, answering not my words, but my tone, said, “Of course it’s none of my business—except that while you’re here you are supposed to be one of us. And I can’t say——”

“Can’t say what?” I demanded, meeting her shrewd eyes squarely with my defiant ones. She flushed a little, and I was glad. But she stuck to her guns.

“I can’t say that it looks any too well! A man in his position, and a girl in yours! Under those circumstances——”

“You know nothing,” I said, deliberately and coldly, “about the circumstances.”

Still more deliberately I tossed a glance into the inevitably soap-splashed mirror at the set of my hat. Then, without another word, I turned out of the open door and walked to the lift, humming a tune just loud enough for them all to hear.

This time I didn’t trouble to glance up from the entrance, where my employer joined me, to the landing window. The girls would not be watching me off this time.

“Savoy!”

The taxi-driver touched his peaked cap with a quite unusual suggestion of deference. I suppose he had found Savoy luncheon-escorts were generous tippers. I wondered if he had ever before driven a couple in quite these “circumstances.”

Miss Robinson’s sincerely-meant reproof, “It doesn’t look any too well! A girl in your position. A man in his!” echoed in my ears louder than the whirring of the wheels and the noise of the traffic. It rankled poisonously throughout the drive, throughout the whole luncheon.

We lunched outside, which Mr. Waters said laconically would be “more amusing for me than inside.” Personally I felt that nothing would ever amuse me less than this duty-lunch with its hateful obbligato-accompaniment of what those other girls were thinking, what they were saying.

Oh, it’s all very well to quote that French axiom—

“They say—What do they say?—Let them say!” The average person will always find that a counsel of perfection.—Especially the average girl. The impulse not to let them “say” if we can help it is nearly as strong in us as the instinct of self-preservation, and of touching our hair when we pass a mirror. So that there must be some really important basic reason for it. I do wish I knew what would happen if that suddenly crumbled away ...?

But it isn’t “away” yet: it spoiled every trace of amusement that I might otherwise have enjoyed in the lunch and the people that passed. I’ve merely a vague impression of cab-whistles, of taxis whirling up beyond the trellis of the low balustrade, of obviously American figures appearing and disappearing among the evergreens; of a small, unhappy-looking face with dark eyes that stared resentfully at me out of the bowls of spoons, and of a voice that said half-absently, “I’m afraid you’ve made a very poor lunch, Miss Trant.”

“Oh, not at all.”

“Perhaps you are tired?”

“Oh, not in the least, thank you.”

“Not too tired to come on somewhere? I thought if you didn’t mind”—this always preludes an order—“we’d drive to Gemmer’s in Bond Street, and choose that ring for you.”

“Ring?” I repeated vaguely, as I put on my gloves.

“You will have to have one, you know. An engagement ring, as the outward and visible sign of the new conditions,” he said nonchalantly, as we rose. “Must have a ring to clinch the effect!”

Yes, I thought resentfully, that “clinches” it—for him. He doesn’t think of my side of the affair at all! He doesn’t see that his accurately mapped-out time-table includes any unpleasantness—just because he doesn’t choose to admit it!

I turned to him as we sat in the cab. I felt like “the turning worm” as I pulled myself together for what I meant to say.

CHAPTER VII
CHOOSING THE RING

“About that—engagement ring, Mr. Waters——”

“Yes?”

“You want me to take to wearing it, as soon as you have got it, I suppose?”

“That’s the idea,” he said, turning a little to look at me while I stared straight at the big white-and-blue buses lumbering up the Strand, but saw, clearer than the traffic, the faces of Miss Robinson, Miss Holt, and Smithie wearing that partly contemptuous, but more angry, expression with which I suppose a decent Trades-Unionist on strike might be entitled to look down upon a blackleg. “Yes, of course it’s for you to wear at once. What else?”

“And—to show the others?”

“Of course!” He looked still more surprised; a little impatient, too. I suppose he felt that again an irritating spoke was being thrust into the well-oiled wheel of his plan.

“I am to show it to them and let them know, in that way, that I am supposed to be engaged to you?”

He answered this with another question.

“Tell me, Miss Trant, have you been having any unpleasantness in the office about this—coming out to lunch with me?”

“N-no,” I said. “Of course,” I added more quickly, “it’s been awkward! You could not expect it not to have been awkward—at least, for me!”

“Ah? Made awkward for you by those girls—what?”

“No! Oh, no!” I fibbed swiftly. For again I could conclude his comment with that relentless “Well, then, they can go!” And I couldn’t have the girls sacked, calmly as I felt I could have seen them all three strangled an hour before. “Only—a little difficult to explain.”

“This will explain it,” said my employer coolly, as the taxi stopped outside the glass door of the great jeweller’s. A page-boy in green-and-silver swung it open for us. And Mr. Waters made me precede him into the softly-carpeted shop with the long glass counters and the white velvet stands curved to the shape of a woman’s neck, on which winked and flashed, gleamed and glowed, diamonds—rubies—pearls—jewels of every description.

“The sight of flowers soothes and softens a woman’s mood. Jewels, on the other hand, stimulate, excite and irritate her. Possibly because they generally signify longings unattainable combined with the knowledge that, given that necklace, or gems like those, or such a pair of ear-rings, and any beauty she has would be tenfold increased.” ... That is how Sydney Vandeleur explained it to me. He’s interested in jewels ever since he won that Arts and Crafts competition for the design of a girdle in silver, mother-o’-pearl, and peridot. And Cicely, of the red curls, once confessed that she would marry an octogenarian if he could give her a really lovely rope of black pearls!

But that was in fun. This was business....

A small, olive-faced shopman in a frock-coat and with curls like a retriever’s back bowed over the counter and flashed his teeth at us. Mentally I nicknamed him Mr. Levi Smarm. It would have taken all Miss Robinson’s powers of mimicry to reproduce the suavity of his “Sir? What may I have the pleasure?”

“We want to see some rings,” said my employer brusquely.

“Engagement rings, sir, of course?”

“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Waters, fixing a cold granite-grey stare just above the retriever’s back—or rather, the jeweller’s head. “Now—”

I felt that he had nearly rapped out his usual “Now, Miss Trant!” but checked himself under the sympathetically intrusive eye of that Jewish salesman as he turned to me—“what stones do you prefer?”

“I? Oh! What does it matter?—I mean, I don’t mind in the least!”

I was remembering things that various girl-friends had told me, in the old days, of the choosing of their engagement rings; of various rings I had seen. One girl, whose fiancé had gipsy blood in his veins, had chosen a gipsy’s silver wedding-ring. Another had a tiny enamel circlet with the posy:

“The Gift is Small

But Love is All.”

If I were the falling-in-love type of girl, which thank goodness I’m not, this scene at Gemmer’s, so utterly opposed to all canons of Romance and tradition, might have seemed a “desecration”—might have got thoroughly on my nerves.

But what was on my nerves, which actually were jangled enough for the moment, was—first, the attitude of the girls towards me ever since I came back from the Carlton yesterday—and, secondly, the Governor’s blind tactlessness, his intention of turning me loose among them, so to speak, alone, to flaunt his ring on my finger!

A positive rage against Still Waters boiled up in me as suddenly as hot milk in the saucepan when you don’t watch it. So, when he suggested, casually, “Let us say diamonds, then, shall we?” I heard myself retort quickly, almost before I knew what I meant:

“Yes, diamonds. Diamonds are always money afterwards, you know!”

As soon as it was out of my mouth I realized that it was an appalling thing to say under any circumstances. Mr. Levi Smarm, however, seemed to consider it an extremely witty remark.

He threw back his curly head and laughed quite pleasantly as he suggested that surely the young lady was not thinking of an “afterwards” already?

“It is always well to be provided for every contingency,” put in Mr. Waters dryly. “I should like to see those diamond rings in that show-case over there, please.”

“There” was at the other end of the shop—which meant that our salesman had to turn his frock-coated back upon us, and that he was out of earshot of the next remarks between his “newly-engaged” customers.

“Miss Trant!”—the Governor spoke curtly and hurriedly—“What was your meaning just now when you said that ‘diamonds were always money afterwards’?”

“Well—I—I understood that they were! Perhaps I ought not to have said it with the man there. I meant that you would not lose anything on it when I return that ring to you in a year’s time from now!”

“Who said anything about ‘returning’ the ring when the so-called engagement is up?” asked Mr. Waters, looking directly at me.

I was aghast.

“But ... naturally I send it back!”

“I had not intended that at all. You will have ... expenses connected with this affair—railway-journeys, and so on, I mean.” He meant clothes again, I suspect, but could not say so. “I intended whatever value the ring might have to stand for those.”

“Thank you,” I said, nearly boiling up again. “In that case I won’t have diamonds, please.”

“This is a very pretty design, madam,” insinuated the returning Mr. Smarm. “The colour of these stones is very beautiful.”

“Yes, but I don’t think I’m going to have diamonds,” I persisted, feeling quite amazed at my own boldness. I meant, however, to carry my point. “I’d rather have pearls—or opals——”

“Very seldom a young lady chooses opals for her engagement ring,” smiled the shopman. “That superstition against opals loses our firm thousands of pounds’ business a year; the majority of ladies considering them so unlucky.”

“I am not superstitious,” I said. “I would like—I am going to have an opal ring, with very small stones in it.”

“We are going to have diamonds,” remarked my employer quietly. “Fetch me some other diamond rings to look at.”

“I would rather not have them,” I urged, in the temporary absence of the black curls and white teeth.

“And I would rather that you had,” ordered my employer. “After all, diamonds are the show-stones; everybody notices them. They look so unmistakably like an engagement, don’t you see?”

“Yes—I see,” I said reluctantly, my nerves feeling more jangled than ever. “But, Mr. Waters, if I must have them, I shall insist upon sending back that ring when——”

“When the time comes we can discuss that,” the Governor cut me short just as Mr. Levi Smarm bent over us with his wave-offering of jewels on a tray. “Yes. That’s a good one, that big fellow with the stones going nearly all round. Those seem a fine colour.”

“A perfect colour, sir; perfectly matched. I am sure that you will——”

“Try it on,” said Mr. Waters, holding the winking, flashing circlet out to me.

I pulled off my left-hand glove, but here the suave shopman, evidently accustomed to shopping couples who showed more appreciation of his sympathy and understanding, interposed again.

“Oh, pardon me, sir, but that will never do. That would be most incorrect! No young lady would keep on an engagement ring that had not been first slipped on to her finger by her fiancé himself!”

Mr. Waters’ glance of contempt at the shopman would have shrivelled up the entire staff at the Near Oriental. But several little things had shown me already that the man who is a Grand Mogul in his own offices can go down several degrees in importance when he leaves the City. Mr. Levi Smarm met that glance with another flashing smile, and evidently waited for us to take this last hint on bridal or betrothal etiquette as it was meant.

I believe Mr. Waters was going to do so. A slight shrug of his broad, sloping shoulders seemed to say, “We may as well have everything en règle while we’re about it,” as he turned to me. But I wasn’t going to have any masquerading “frills” about this business that could possibly be avoided, and this particular development in our “romance” was avoidable. I said very quickly and decidedly, “Oh, but I don’t believe in anything of that sort, you know.” Then quietly I took the ring, before he knew what I was about, out of my employer’s hand, and slipped it on to my own “wedding-finger.”

There was a faint purple smudge off a new ribbon on my knuckle just above the ring. I couldn’t help thinking how entirely characteristic of the whole affair this was: the stain of my daily labour, showing side by side with these wonderful stones—that must also be worn as part of the gaining of my daily bread.

The ring fitted as if measured for me.

“You wish me to keep this?” I said briskly to the Governor.

“Yes, I think that one will do perfectly,” he replied; and he turned to the young jeweller again.

It was to ask the price, I knew. I was seized with that ineradicable feeling of distress that claims a woman under any circumstances whatsoever—when mention is made of payment for her, by another. She loves to be paid for—with all thought of price ignored. So I rose and turned to bend over another glass counter under which gleamed pendants of pearls and emeralds—which I scarcely saw, for another couple had strayed into the shop—a plainish girl, simply and rather dowdily dressed; a man like dozens of others—and they interested me. Their two faces were as radiant as if they had come into a fortune sufficient to buy up the whole of Gemmer’s six times over, but I heard the girl whisper, awe-struck and ecstatic, “Oh, Harry, no! I won’t let you! It’s absurd, for people like us.” ...

“People like us aren’t going to be married every day! Considering I nearly wrecked my constitution and made myself unspeakably ill-tempered by giving up smoking for eight months,” growled the young man, “just to save up enough to be absurd, you won’t catch me wasting it on being sensible.”

“I’ll write you out the cheque now, and wait while you ring up my bank, then,” the Governor’s voice was saying; then came purrs from Mr. Levi Smarm, of “Shall not detain you a moment, sir ... Thank you, sir; perfectly all right. Much obliged. Good afternoon, sir” (with a bend to the waist). “Good afternoon, madam” (with an even lower bend). Then he turned the eyes and teeth and curls on the young couple who had saved up to be “absurd.” I wondered whether he would notice the difference between them and—his last customers. Probably. Ah, but he could hardly be expected to know quite what it was!

“I hope,” said Mr. Waters, civilly, on our way back to the office, “that that little Hebrew bounder didn’t annoy you. That sort of thing is all part of his business, you understand.”

“Of course I understand,” said I submissively.

“I am glad you—didn’t mind it,” said Mr. Waters.

I longed to be able to retort, “Mind? Why on earth should I? Please try to understand that there’s no reason I need ‘mind,’ any more than one of those curved white velvet stands at Gemmer’s should mind whose hand clasps and unclasps the necklace of amethysts and peridots that it displays. I’m quite content to let my finger be a ‘stand,’ to show off these diamonds, for which—for some unexplained reason—you’ve got to pay someone to be the ‘official’ wearer! All I ‘mind’ is the way you do these things—it’s clumsy beyond belief!”

One comfort that remains to me is that I need only wear this hateful ring of his while I am on show—and not at other times.

No tightly-corseted Victorian has ever so longed to be alone in her bedroom again and undo her torturing case of whalebone and coutil as I shall long to get away, every time I’m wearing this “engagement” ring—to the mere pleasure of taking it off!

CHAPTER VIII
THE ENGAGEMENT IS ANNOUNCED!

“Ten past three, by Jove; later than I thought again,” muttered my employer as we reached the office again. “And I’ve got all those letters to get through yet.... Miss Trant, I shall have to ask you to come straight through to my room, please, and take these down at once, as I’m off early this afternoon.”

So, still in my hat and coat, I walked straight through to Mr. Waters’ own office, sat down at the clerk’s table, and stripped off my gloves to the afternoon’s work. (It’s alarming to see how “twice-on” white gloves become impossible in London. I’m afraid quite a lot of my hard-earned ten pounds a week will go on those items alone, now that I’m constrained to lunch at these haunts of the well-dressed!)

All through the stress of following the Governor’s top-speed dictation with my scurrying shorthand, I was conscious of the bulge of that newly-bought ring—heavy as a door-knob, it seemed now!—on my engagement finger, and shooting its arrogant glances of orange and emerald and rose-colour over the dull pages of my pad.

I was glad that it had not had to be displayed at once in the dressing-room; glad of the respite of my hour’s toil. But that seemed to come to an end before I had even begun to set my teeth, mentally, to the next ordeal.

—“and beg to remain, gentlemen, yours, etc.—Yes; that’ll do, Miss Trant, thank you,” came the Governor’s dismissal.

I put back my chair and stood up. Now for it! Now for the announcement of this engagement! I supposed that I need not begin by saying a word to those three other girls. I should only have to walk over to my typing-table, sit down and open my machine, and the flash of the electric light on those marvellous stones above the keyboard would draw three pair of eyes upon me at once. Should I have to answer that clamouring gaze, or would the girls put it into questions of so many words?

“Miss Trant?—Look, girls!—I say, tell us, tell us? It’s not a joke? It’s an engagement ring all right? You’re not trying to have us on, now? Are you going to tell us——?”

Whichever way it happened, it was going to be perfectly awful. Never mind. It had got to be. It was part of the price of that five hundred pounds, of Jack’s salvation.

“What’s the matter, Miss Trant?” asked the Governor, with a quick glance up at me as I passed his chair.

“Nothing, thank you. I am going to let the others know, now, about this”—I moved that detested ring on my hand into another challenging flash. “And I suppose you will require me to-morrow at lunch again?”

“No—yes—that is——About telling the others of this engagement of ours,” took up Mr. Waters unexpectedly. “Would you, by any chance, prefer that I did that myself?”

Would I? I nearly gasped with relief! Why couldn’t he have seen before what a difference this would make to the situation? There isn’t much dignity in it, goodness knows. But this would save some appearance of it, at all events! I said quietly, “If it is the same to you, I certainly should prefer it.”

“Then please wait here while I see them. I won’t keep you a moment,” said Still Waters, and he walked quickly out of the room.

It seemed an hour to me, but I suppose the minute-hand of the round-topped clock on the broad marble mantelpiece had only moved on two steps before the door opened again to admit my employer.

“That’s all right,” he told me, with his succinct nod. “I have announced the ‘engagement’ to the three other typists, and shall let Mr. Dundonald and Mr. Alexander know before I leave. I won’t keep you, Miss Trant. Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” I said. “Thank you.”

For the first time in my life I really felt like thanking him. And yet he’d only done the most ordinary thing that one would expect the most ordinary man to take as a matter of course. Only the custom-honoured practice of the Near Oriental is to refuse to regard its head as an ordinary man. Of course, he isn’t. There are advantages in making a presupposition of this kind, perfectly clear from the very start!

Feeling comparatively at ease and my own mistress again, I entered the typists’ room with my head as high as it had been when I marched out to the lift at lunch-time after Miss Robinson’s voicing of what they all thought of me.

Miss Robinson, with her shrewd face startled into the likeness of someone much younger and less astute, broke away from the other two—they had been all three chattering and knotted up together in the corner by the cupboard where the tea-things are kept—and came frankly towards me.

“Well, Miss Trant! Here’s some news we’ve just had sprung on us,” said she, speaking as if she found great difficulty in sorting out her words. “I must say—well, really! Gracious! Are you going to shake hands and let us congratulate you, as I suppose is the right thing, or are you feeling wild with me about this morning? We didn’t know, you know. We never dreamed——! How was anyone to guess, after all——!”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I said, shaking hands with one after the other. “And of course I’m not feeling ‘wild!’” My revenge was to hand if I wanted it. But somehow I didn’t feel it would be worth it, now. Though, as a matter of fact, the reminder of what I had felt that morning had brought some of it surging back over me again. And this feeling was not improved by the wording of little Miss Holt’s felicitations.

“‘Wild?’ I should think Miss Trant was ready to pat herself on the back for the next week, eh? Who’d ’a thought of this, that day we were all trying to buck her up at lunch when she was afraid she was going to get the sack? Didn’t I say then, though, that Miss Trant would do all right because she’d got a taking way with men? But—the Governor himself—that we never did look upon as just a ‘man!’ Well, you never can tell!”

“I shall never try to, after this afternoon,” announced Miss Robinson. “Not after his marching in at that door there, and saying, in quite a human sort of voice—not his own voice at all—that is, you’ll excuse me, Miss Trant! You know what I mean!—saying, ‘I have some news to tell you ladies. Miss Trant and I are engaged to be married!’”

“Married to the head of the firm—my hat!” breathed Miss Holt, devouring me with her eyes, as if she thought that by staring hard enough she might discover the secret of how one achieved this giddy height. “Too grand to speak to any of us after this! Look at that ring of hers! Think of all that means!”—

Yes! If she only could!

—“No more turning out to get to business every morning, wet or dry, with the mud still stiff on your skirt that you haven’t had time to brush! No more lining up with the crowd to wait for that beastly old workman’s tram at the ‘Elephant!’ No more strap-hanging! No more packed motor-buses with flower-women, and goodness knows what, shoving their baskets into you and trampling on your feet as they get in!” She took breath, and then, for fear one of the others should interrupt before she finished this harangue upon the Dignity of Labour, she hurried on—“No more having to keep on at it if you are ready to drop and your eyes popping out of your head—no more A.B.C. girls not taking the slightest notice of your order and then giving you sauce because you’ve waited half an hour for your lunch—no more slaving from har’-past nine to six for her any more!... I suppose you know you’re most awfully lucky?”

“In some ways,” murmured Miss Smith softly. “But having stacks of money and never having to work again isn’t everything!”

And the dreamy look that came into her eyes irritated me worse than the loudly-expressed envy of the other girl. Miss Holt’s type of mind, that cares only for the things that she can see and handle and wear and eat and drink, is so much easier to tackle than an un-practical person’s point of view. I’m glad I’m rather like Miss Holt, myself. These sentimental people are too tiresome!

I simply couldn’t help one snap at Miss Smith as I turned to her.

“I suppose nothing’s ‘everything’ except wasting years waiting for Love in a flat? I suppose you despise any hard-up girl who’s sick of the struggle and who marries for comfort and a home?”

“I don’t despise anybody, Miss Trant, as it happens!” protested Smithie, facing me with the sudden defiance of a mild nature touched in its tenderest spot. “You didn’t ought to speak sarcastically to me, just because you can get married at once instead of waiting—years—till he can afford——”

“Well, and you needn’t despise me for that other reason, at all events,” I said, a little mollified by the tears that were now welling up in the dreamy eyes, “for, whatever else I may be going to do, Miss Smith, I am not going to marry Mr. Waters for his money!”

I didn’t add that I shouldn’t ever marry him at all, but that his money was quite good enough to get engaged to him on. However, had I openly announced this, I don’t think she could have looked more surprised.

“Not for his money—marry him for love, then? Him?” screamed little Miss Holt before she could stop herself. Then she clapped her hand over her wide-open mouth, another involuntary gesture, caused partly, I suppose, by the impulse to keep back anything further that might offend me, and partly by the appearance at the door of Mr. Dundonald.

It was to everybody’s amazement that this was not immediately followed by the inevitable “Talk-ing, ladies!” and the scowl.

But an extensive smile creased Mr. Dundonald’s shut fist of a face into unfamiliar lines of benevolence; he beamed upon us all as he announced in a voice as suavely unfamiliar as the smile, “Miss Trant! I am sorry to interrupt your conversation, but Mr. Waters would be much obliged if you would go back to his room again for a moment, as he wishes to say a few words to you!”

“Oh, certainly,” I said, wondering what in the world this additional “order” might be. The girls didn’t “wonder.” I know they thought it was for another good-bye—especially Smithie, one-idea’d simpleton! I felt her demure little smile in the small of my back as I turned to the door. Mr. Dundonald—oh, unprecedented occurrence!—held it open for me, murmuring, as I passed out, “Miss Trant! May I be permitted to proffer my very heartiest good wishes on the occasion of this—this delightful announcement?”

“Oh! Thank you so much,” I said pleasantly. (“Worm!” I thought.)

So the Governor had told Mr. Dundonald while I was receiving the congratulations of my colleagues....

I saw in his eye—grey, fishy, and always looking as if “the Main Chance” were plainly visible just ahead of any person he addressed—that already my personality had changed from that of the twenty-five-shillings-a-week typist, clad in her “all-I’ve-got” serge costume and liable to dismissal at his hands, to that of young Mrs. William Waters, who, gorgeous in silk, satin and sables, would one of these days be calling at the office to pick up the head of the firm and to motor him home with her! Mr. Dundonald’s new manner was a forecast of his reception of me when that day should dawn!

If he only knew!

“Sorry to trouble you again,” said the Governor as I presented myself before him once more. “I forgot, in the middle of all that other business”—this, I suppose, might have applied to either the dictating of his letters, or the choosing of his betrothal ring—“to tell you that I intend to let my mother know, to-night, about this engagement of ours.”

“Oh, yes.”

“You will probably hear from her to-morrow, inviting you to stay at our house—it’s near Sevenoaks. You had better send in your formal resignation to the office at once, and make your arrangements to come on for a fortnight’s visit or so, in a few days. Will that be convenient to you?”

“Oh, perfectly,” I said obediently, hoping that I did not show any outward symptoms of that sick feeling of panic that possessed me. To stay at the Governor’s house? So soon? Horrors! With the Governor’s mother? What will she be like? Exactly like him, probably, only far more forbidding; women can always be more alarming than even the most terrifying of men. An elderly feminine edition of Still Waters! Ye gods! And she will hate me, of course; look upon me as that designing minx of a typist who had “got round” her son in business-hours and prevented him from “doing well for himself” in some other direction. People with money always want their children to marry people with more! It will be Lady Vandeleur over again, only worse. How appalling! Perhaps she will make herself as disagreeable to me as possible, in the hope of inducing me to feel that I should never be able to stand such a mother-in-law, and that I should simply have to break it off!—which, under the circumstances, I’m powerless to do!

“And—er—that will be all, this afternoon, thank you. You will hand your notes of my letters to Mr. Alexander. If you have arrangements to make, you can leave as early as you choose to-day.”

“Thank you, Mr. Waters.”

Feeling that I couldn’t have stood another minute of him and his “arrangements,” I walked quickly out of the room and down the passage.

Round a corner, I heard the voice of our office mimic, who had slipped out on some pretext, in full flow of narrating to one of the telephone girls the amazing news that I know was being buzzed all over the Near Oriental offices.

—“but, my dear, the little Trant gives out she’s madly in love with him! She says”—here a most successful imitation of my own voice—“‘Whatever else I may be doing, I am NOT marrying him for his money!’”

“P’raps it’s for his kind heart and his charm of manner, I don’t think,” suggested the telephone girl. “Or his good looks, eh?”

“Nothing actually the matter with his looks, my girl. Anyhow, he does always look as if he went in for no end of cold water, and week-end tramps, and golf, and the windows wide open, and decent soap—cuticura, I’ve smelt it,” said Miss Robinson. “And as if he could heave things—which nobody else does, in this establishment. And if you can get over the general effect of ‘the stern-and-solemn-Nelson’s column——’”

“Well, I can’t. But she’s quite pretty if she’d only make a little more of herself; p’raps she will now,” said the telephone girl, who wears long coral drop-earrings and pins brown-paper cuffs over her sleeves in business-hours. “What on earth do you suppose he said when he proposed to her?”

“‘Now, Miss Trant, when you have taken down that Buenos Ayres order, there is something I have to consult you about personally. Now, Miss Trant, are you prepared to consider——’”

It was so exactly our employer’s voice that I, standing there unnoticed, burst out laughing. The girls, caught out, laughed too.

“You didn’t know you were the talk of the place, did you, Miss Trant? May as well make up your mind to it,” said Miss Robinson. “And do show Miss Harris your ring!”

“I could see it from here. I thought it was something being done to the electric lights. My! but they are sparklers! I shouldn’t half swank, wearing jewellery like this. Did you choose it to-day, Miss Trant? My word! Some people do have all the luck. It’ll be a very short engagement, I presume?”

“I don’t think so,” said I, thinking of the nearly twelve complicated and weary months that stretched before me. “Some time yet.”

“No doubt any time’ll seem long na-ow,” said the telephone girl archly. “Can’t you tell us about when it’s likely to be?”

Oh, dear! It seemed to me as if I passed through hours of this sort of thing before I could break away and set out for Battersea and our bachelor-girl flat.

Wearily, and without any “spring” left in me, I climbed the four flights of stone steps. I felt positively dragged down by the thought of that awful fortnight with the Governor’s mother at their house near Sevenoaks. It had clung to me all the way back. Only as I put my key into the door did I remember something else.

There would be Cicely to break the news of my engagement to, now!

CHAPTER IX
THE LOVER WHO CAME TOO LATE

But here, in our flat, I found to my amazement that someone had been before me with the news.

Cicely’s marigold-coloured hair and flushed face reared themselves up excitedly from the faded couch cushions as I came in.

“I say! Tots! What’s all this?—Look here, what is the meaning of it?” she cried breathlessly. “What’s this wild story about you being engaged to be married? Do say it isn’t true;—it can’t be! is it?”

“Who in the world,” I demanded, standing by our rickety old table in the middle of the room and staring at her as she sat up leaning on her elbow, “told you anything about it?”

“Well, who d’you suppose? Who would?”

I glanced quickly at the tray on the table, crowded with the débris of what had been tea for two, one saucer piled high with cigarette-ends that told their own tale. Who had been? One of Cicely’s Slade girls? But how would they know? Whoever it was must have stayed hours!

“It was your friend”—Cicely announced this even as the cork hurls itself from an unwired bottle of champagne—“Mr. Sydney Vandeleur!”

“Sydney—he’s been here?”

“Well, of course!”

“What on earth for?”

“What for, Tots? Why, to see you! And, I say! How awfully charming and clever and delightful he is! And so handsome! Such a real artist’s head, I call it! Exactly like a Vandyke of Charles the First! Oh, my dear! Don’t tell me you’ve gone and got engaged to somebody else, when there’s such a really wonderful person so desperately in love with you!”

“Who says he’s in love with me?”

“Why, he does, of course. Didn’t you know? You must have. Didn’t you?”

“N-no.”

Slowly I dropped my gloves and umbrella and vanity-bag and paper on to the table. Of course I have “known,” at the back of my mind, all the time about Sydney. But however positive a girl may be that a man cares for her, until he’s told her so she’s never certain. This may sound Irish—to a man. Any girl understands....

To hear the fact proclaimed by Cicely’s lips—which really, I do believe, would blurt out anything that came into her red head!—gave me the same shock of surprise that it would have done even if I’d never received little attentions from Sydney, never heard his neatly-turned compliments, never seen those handsome brown eyes of his fixed upon me in unmistakable admiration, or noticed the blank mask that had suddenly fallen over them yesterday, when I broke to the Vandeleurs the news of my so-called engagement. Cicely went on with her tale, enjoying it thoroughly.

“My dear Tots, you must have known. He’s wanted to marry you ever since you were a slip of a schoolgirl with a little proud pearl of a face and that lovely dark hair of yours in a great mane down to your waist. Even then he always meant to propose to you.”

“And he tells you that? Not me?”

Here I sat down suddenly in the elbow-chair with the one arm “that’s always a-comin’ off, drat it!” as Mrs. Skinner says.

It came off now.

“Drat it!” I quoted, through my teeth, and hurled the broken arm into a corner with a violence that did some—not much—good to my feelings. “He never told me, Cicely.”

“Because he was too tactful, too nice. He’d too much fine feeling,” she explained eagerly. “He couldn’t possibly ask you so soon after the ‘smash’ in your affairs, and after Colonel Trant’s death, and all. It would have looked too much as if he were taking advantage of that to rush the position. He determined to wait until you—until he—well, to wait,” said Cicely. “He saw I was sympathetic; he didn’t mind telling me all this. But he was going to ask you when he and his mother came back from abroad. All the time, he was simply longing to come and carry you off bodily from that hateful typewriter where he kept thinking of you chained, he said, like Andromeda (who was she, exactly?) to her rock. Only he just wouldn’t. Wasn’t it sweet of him, Tots!”

“To wait and tell all this to another girl?”

“But it was you he was coming round to tell!”

“He didn’t stop to see me.”

“He had to get back to Belgrave Square and dress for a theatre-party of his mother’s.”

“What he came for at all, after yesterday, I don’t see!”

“It was about yesterday he came to see you, Tots! You see, he says he met you, and you seem to have made him understand that you were engaged to be married.”

“Well? Didn’t he believe me? Did he come round here and sit here filling the place with that abominable reek of Egyptian cigarettes—and, yes! finishing all that nice peach jelly I got in specially for you—to find out whether it was true?”

“Is it true, then?” gasped Cicely.

“Yes! I told him so. I told Lady Vandeleur so. I am engaged.”

“And not—to him!” Cicely seemed utterly unable to grasp how this could be. “What? After all he’s said—and with his photograph on your dressing-table—not that it’s nearly good enough for him! And after what I told him I hoped——”

“What DID you tell him?” I groaned resignedly.

Cicely twisted the long, slender figure, upon which her equally slender salary as a mannequin depends, into a more comfortable curve against the cushions.

“Well! Poor Mr. Vandeleur! When he said he’d seen you lunching at the Carlton alone with a young man, I told him it must be a mistake. You never did lunch there, or with young men. It was just what I admired you for, when it’s so easy to get into the other way of being rather nice to people just for the sake of their giving you a good time and a change from being at work all day! And even though you’re not a bit stuffy with me because I sometimes do it, you——”

“Never mind me. What did he say?”

“He said: ‘But how could there be a mistake? She brought up this self-satisfied-looking individual and introduced him to my mother as her fiancé. She let us congratulate him!’ I said, ‘Well, but she hasn’t got a fiancé—or I should have known about it! I’ve never heard a syllable. She didn’t even tell me she was going out to lunch. She must have been taken out at a moment’s notice—by a friend of Jack Trant’s, perhaps. Or,’ I said, ‘it may have been someone she absolutely had to meet, on business!’” she continued vaguely—much she knows about business!—“‘Getting a better post, or something of that sort. And when she met you unexpectedly, she was flurried, and didn’t know how to explain. Is your mother rather particular, or strait-laced?’ Mr. Vandeleur said, ‘Very, I am afraid!’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s what must have happened!—Tots, in her nervousness, and not wishing your mother to be shocked, just blurted out ‘fiancé’——”

“Thank you,” I muttered. “I didn’t know I was a blurter-out!”

“You mean I am! I daresay! Well, I don’t care! I thought that must have been it—I didn’t see what else it could have been! And the poor man was so thirsting to hear anything I could tell him about you, that I should have been a brute not to!” declared my chum, plaintively defiant. “So I just said everything I could—about that photograph, and all!”

“What photograph?” I snapped.

“Why, that one of Mr. Vandeleur. I recognized him from that, the moment Mrs. Skinner let him in. And I told him that it was the one and only portrait of a young man that you seemed to possess, and that you always keep it in a silver frame beside your looking-glass. Now, Tots, you can’t say you don’t!”

No; I couldn’t.

“And that cheered him up so, poor fellow! He said—Oh, isn’t it a tragedy?” interpolated Cicely with zest—“that I’d given him fresh hope to go away with!”

“Fresh fiddlesticks,” I muttered, still more savagely.

“You mean there isn’t any?”

“I mean,” I explained as patiently as I could, “that a girl can’t be engaged to two men at once.”

“Then who’s this other, Tots, that you’ve never said a word about? He can’t possibly be fit to hold a candle to—I mean, who is it?”

“It is the managing director and head of the firm where I’ve been working,” I told her bluntly. “His name is Mr. William Waters.”

“What? Not the man you all call ‘Still Waters’? The one you all detest, who’s so impossible to please? Engaged to him? Oh, now you’re pretending! Tell me, Tots. Of course you are only joking, after all?”

A nice idea of “joking” my chum has got!

“Does this look like a joke?” I demanded suddenly. The newly-bought diamonds flashed under her widely-opened eyes. “Don’t you admire my engagement ring, Cis?”

Cicely Harradine’s soft bud of a face faded from pink to pale, and her big eyes clouded dolefully. She said nothing for a moment but “Oh, Tots!” (she’s quite as hopeless as Miss Smith). Then, in a tone of the timidest reproach, she faltered, “Mr. Vandeleur said he was ‘big and blonde and City-fied and extremely prosperous-looking.’ I said I’d never seen any friend of yours who was like that. No wonder! The head of the firm! But—Tots!—I should—should hate to think of you, of all girls, marrying anyone because of his—money?”

“Then don’t think it. You may do me that justice!” I said sharply. She was nearly as bad in her way as the typists at the Near Oriental had been in theirs—and the same prevarication had to be used to “head off” her comments on a marriage for money. After which, the accusation in my chum’s big eyes melted suddenly into tears. Impulsively she flung her slim arms round my neck—and I had to let her.

“Forgive me, Tots. Dear old girl, but how was I to know? It’s all so unexpected, and I never met him, and you never gave me a hint! I didn’t see how you could possibly prefer anyone to Mr. Vandeleur, who is so wonderful! But of course I know Love’s blind—I mean, you can’t make yourself not care for this Mr. Waters, just because another man wants so badly to marry you! Oh, Tots, it’s all my fault, but I’m afraid he’s going to write to you about that——”

“Mr. Vandeleur is?” (This, too!)

“Yes! It’s all because of what I said to him. I have been putting my foot in it,” she admitted, as if this were quite a new idea to me too, “but do forgive me—Since you do really care for this Mr. Waters I’m only too delighted, darling. Oh, I’m so glad for your happiness, you can’t think! When did it happen? He’s madly in love with you, of course?”

Here I thought grimly of Miss Robinson’s version: “My dears, the little Trant makes out she’s madly in love with him!” All this about two people who, as far as I can make out, have only one thing in common—both being absolutely falling-in-love-proof!

Poor, well-meaning, warm-hearted Cicely was still effusing; eager to make up for her first suspicion that I wasn’t engaged for the only right reason.

“I ought to have seen! Of course! It was he who gave you this extra work about a fortnight ago?”

“Exactly!” (Extra work with a vengeance! More than I’ve bargained for!)

—“And that we were so thankful for, just when I lost my own job and was ill, and there were all those extra things to get.... It was your ‘rise’ that got them all, I knew. Only I didn’t know ... this other. It began then, I suppose, Tots?”

“Yes, it began then.”

“How romantic! Well! And I did notice that you’ve been absent-minded and not saying much these last few days, and I ought to have known why it was. Especially yesterday. Did HE take you out to lunch again to-day? Oh, doesn’t it make the whole world different for you?”

“It makes the menu jolly different, anyhow,” I admitted.

“Ah, yes; you may pretend to be as flippant as you like about it, but I know that’s ‘all put on’ to hide what you’re really feeling!” declared Cicely.

Such a convenient conviction! I made up my mind, then and there, that this was just the line I should adopt with my chum. And laughing merrily for her benefit, I fled to my own little room.

Here, left to my own thoughts at last, I flung myself down on my creaky little camp bedstead and raged as I reviewed this new aspect of the situation. Put crudely, it is this: It’s not until I tie myself up with this wretched sham “engagement” to the Governor that I have the chance of cutting everything to do with him and his odious office, and becoming safely, happily and genuinely engaged!

Or, in the jargon of the Near Oriental, it’s just after I’ve sold out at a loss that I get an advantageous offer!

Why on earth couldn’t Sydney Vandeleur have said all that before? A year ago—even a month ago—and, to think what it would have saved! I shouldn’t have minded getting that money for Jack—from his own brother-in-law! Yes; if he’s cared for me all this time, why couldn’t he have proposed to and married me before I’d so much as seen that hateful Near Oriental, with that “Andromeda’s rock” of a typewriter, watched over by what Miss Holt calls “that Gordian” of a Governor! Why couldn’t Sydney have hurried up, for once in his life, to play Perseus?

“Too much tact!” Good gracious! Why must men have this absurd code of ethics about “the right thing” when there’s a woman in the case? Why does a man who’s hard-up, for instance, consider it so much more “honourable” to “ride away” without a word to the girl whose heart he knows is his, just because he “feels he oughtn’t to propose before he’s in a position to marry?”

He “feels he ought not to stand in the girl’s way of better offers.” ... But he does that, more often than not, with her first sight of him! Never mind. He’d rather leave her fretting her heart out for life over the belief that he was only flirting after all, or let her make a miserable marriage with someone else—rather than be “dishonourable” enough to own up that he cares and wants her to wait perhaps three or four years for him. He’s saved his precious “code,” just as I suppose Sydney wished to save his.

Oh, men’s “fine feelings,” men’s delicacy and tact, men’s sense of honour! What infinitely greater damage these do in the world than all women’s lack of principle!

That sounds sweeping, but isn’t this enough to make a girl storm at the scruples—or whatever they may call them—which have pretty well messed up her own life for her?

I ought to be safely and happily married, by now, to Sydney Vandeleur. He’d make a charming husband, I know; not a wish of his wife’s that he wouldn’t immediately try to gratify, from the pattern of the drawing-room carpets to where she would wish to live most of the time—Pont Street—Park Lane—or the perfectly gorgeous, old-fashioned castle with all modern conveniences that he owns in Ireland—Ballycool, they call it. Oh, for the deep sighing woods and the silver lakes over there—miles and miles from anywhere else—scented solitude, with all the drawbacks of solitude removed by motors ad lib.—by big house-parties of amusing people as often as one chose!—Yes, I suppose I do share Miss Holt’s type of mind, but then I never pretend to be romantic, or to cherish illusions about being able to fall in love.... I should be really, genuinely fond of Sydney himself—I mean I should have been. He’d be so devoted—how could one help feeling pleased to have him about, approving of everything one did and said and looked? He’s what I’d call companionable; not too lofty and masculine to take an interest in the details that mean so much more to a woman than what this country is coming to, by Gad, or what on earth McKenna or Asquith or someone is driving at when he says—(here yards, droned aloud, out of the Times)—or whether Kent is going to do any better this year; which is all the conversation that any married women I’ve ever met seem to get out of their husbands. Sydney would always know what anyone had had on at a party, including his wife. He’d be able to help her think out her frocks—and what heavenly frocks they would be! Then he’s so undeniably good-looking himself. One wouldn’t be able to help appreciating the fact that the other women would always notice it with envy, and would put it down as such a score to the credit of the one he’d married! His dark, “interesting” face with the Vandyke beard and the melancholy brown eyes seems watching me now out of the big silver frame in which he sent it to me. Yes; it certainly does hold the place of honour on the narrow painted-pine chest-of-drawers that has two handles missing, but is still spread with ivory-topped brushes, a monogrammed hand-mirror and long crystal scent flagons—relics from the wreck of the Trant fortunes!—the place of honour usually reserved in a girl’s room for the portrait of HIM—whoever “he” may be! Why did I put it there? Partly for the sake of old times, I suppose; I’ve tried to keep everything of that sort which was in my room at home.... Partly to remind myself, whenever I’ve felt extra-downhearted, that there was at least one eminently presentable young man who was accustomed to say pretty things of the face and hair that I saw reflected in the somewhat wavy looking-glass near by.... Sentiment, vanity, or a mixture of both, but not the motive with which Cicely had credited me and which she’d seen fit to impart to the original.

That idiot of a Sydney! If I could hope he’d feel it, I’d smash the glass of that frame and run red-hot hat-pins into his portrait. I have been furiously angry to-day, in turns with the three typists, with Still Waters, and with Cicely—but none of this counts, compared with my fury against the lover who has come too late!

It’s his fault. It’s all his fault—all that’s just happened—all that will happen during the mad “arrangement” of this next year. And when that year’s up, where will it find me? A little richer, perhaps, by what’s left of my desperately-won salary, but back in the over-crowded labour-market, the world of working-women who lose looks and youth and spirits in the struggle for daily bread. Oh, it’s all very well to be plucky, and to treat everything as a joke, and to live from one Saturday matinée to another, making the most of life in London as a bachelor-girl—while you’re twenty-one.

What becomes of the “bachelor-girl” of forty-five? And fifty?

That, I suppose, I shall have to wait and find out for myself, thanks to Mr. Sydney Vandeleur!

Why couldn’t he have left things as they were at the Carlton?—

But I’ve had enough of this. It has “done me up” completely.

I am going to bed.

* * * * *

This morning I feel, if anything, angrier with Sydney Vandeleur than I did before.

He’s done it now! He has written.

His note lies before me on our wobbly little breakfast-table with the metal coffee-pot and the green Bruges crock full of lilac (bought out of my “rise”!) screening me from Cicely’s anxious eyes as I read:

“My dearest Monica,

“I have never called you so before. That was a mistake. Anything is a mistake that keeps us two apart. Dear, I want to come and see you at once, but cannot get out of some odious ‘arrangements’ of the Mamma’s for this week-end.

“Let me come on Monday afternoon, and, though I don’t deserve it, be kind to me then.

“Till then, and ever,

“Your devoted S. V.”

Now I have written; and pretty quickly too.

“My dear Sydney,

“It was kind of you to write to me to congratulate me again on my engagement to Mr. Waters, which I suppose is the meaning of your note. You suggest calling; is this to congratulate me for the third time? If so, I can only hope that my happiness will keep pace with your good wishes for it! But I am afraid that I shall not be able to receive them in person on Monday, as it is the very day that I hope to be going off to Sevenoaks, on a visit to my fiancé’s mother.

“Please give my very kindest regards to Lady Vandeleur, and believe me

“Sincerely yours,

“Monica Trant.”

There!

CHAPTER X
“HIS” MOTHER’S INVITATION

The note of invitation from “my fiancé’s mother” is purely formal and absolutely non-committal; in fact, exactly the note I should have imagined that a Mrs. Waters would write.

I’ve got a perfectly clear mental image of this mother of an animated tape-machine. Handsome, in a regular-profiled, stately, mid-Victorian style, with steely grey eyes that “corkscrew” all the self-possession out of you, and—oh, the manner! She won’t be openly disagreeable after all, I’ve decided. Worse; she’ll be rigidly, frigidly polite; clothing in irreproachable civilities the obvious wonder whether her son has taken leave of his senses, to propose to one of his own employees.

She writes that she looks forward (of course!) with pleasure (dis-pleasure, she means) to making my acquaintance (will she!) at The Lawn (well, I suppose they can’t call their house The Sarcophagus. But that’s what it ought to be. A glorified edition of the Governor’s private office. Marble halls and chilly statuary—brr!) on Monday next. I expect she guesses that “this Miss Trant,” or “that young woman,” or “the horrid little typist-person,” or whatever she calls me in her own mind, will be rather overwhelmed by the prospect; and no doubt Mrs. Waters means to see that I shall continue being overwhelmed—“kept in my place,” indeed—during the whole of the fortnight that the Governor specified. But she can’t realize the positive panic with which I anticipate the meeting. And, if I can steel myself to help it, she shall not realize it.

“I should think you can hardly wait until you get there, Tots,” said Cicely, watching me pack new clothes in the new dress-basket bought specially for the dread occasion, for I’ve spent every minute of two days in shopping. “Aren’t you dying to see what everything is going to be like?”

“I shall have to survive until to-morrow, anyhow.”

“‘His’ home! His father’s dead, you said. Is there only his mother?”

“I suppose so. Quite enough too. I think all engaged men ought to be orphans and only children before they begin, for the sake of the girl. ‘Only’ his mother, indeed!”

“Well, she’s bound to be pleased with you, Tots! You’re so pretty and ripping, especially now you’ve got all these lovely new things. What a mercy that you had that little windfall of a legacy just in time to let you buy all fresh!”

(This is how I’ve been obliged to account for that.)

“You could go and stay anywhere now, meet anybody! He’ll be so proud of you. It must be such a comfort for an engaged man when he knows that his people and his friends can see what he means when he shows off his fiancée to them for the first time, instead of their wondering what on earth he finds to admire!”

“Do you think Mrs. Waters will ‘see what he means’ by his getting himself engaged to his clerk?” I said, with a private giggle at my own bitterness. “I wish I did!”

“Now, Tots, don’t fish for any more compliments. You know how people must admire you. Why, as Mr. Vandel—I mean, it’s so obvious! Don’t look so depressed, my dear. Of course I suppose going to meet ‘his’ people is always a fearful ordeal, but it ought to be less so for you than for most engaged girls!”

* * * * *

Perhaps—though Cicely doesn’t know why—it ought!

Anyhow, these encouraging words of my chum’s were still echoing in my ears as a late afternoon train bore me off from Victoria towards Sevenoaks and that terrifying visit to my (official) mother-in-law elect. For the first time since the days when it was a matter of course for me to do so, I travelled first class. It wouldn’t do for me to alight at Sevenoaks station under the eyes of some pompous Waters domestic, all crumpled and dusty and warm from a compartment crowded with market-baskets and moist babies. I am taking this man’s money to pose as his fiancée, and it’s only fair to him that I should do him no discredit in any way.

So I travelled down in expensive seclusion, wearing for the first time one of my new costumes, a real success in thick tobacco-brown silk, with a duck of a little brown hat to match. Cicely chose that out of a big boxful “on approval” from Madame Chérisette’s.

Even without Cicely’s gratifying gush on the subject, I can’t help knowing that the smoky-cream underlining and the trimming—a cream-coloured feathery mount and a knot of dull-pink buds—are delightfully becoming to a clear brunette complexion and glossy black hair.

Thanks to my being an easy-to-fit small “stock size,” I’ve got a really charming little trousseau together at very short notice. As it’s probably the only trousseau of any sort that I shall ever possess now (I wonder what Sydney Vandeleur thought of my note?), I selected it with gusto, and I mean to enjoy the wearing of every stitch of it, from the fur-lined motor-wrap to those American-pattern nighties that the girl in the shop said were “so sweetly bridal-looking, Moddam.”

It’s been such ages since I was able to choose and arrange a kit with garments for separate occasions and with a definite colour-scheme; it’s so long I’ve been, not “dressed,” but “covered”—yes! covered in patches with something in navy-blue that I’ve managed to afford at one time; something in brown that I’ve “had to have” at another time; something black that I’ve just “had by me.”

But now I shall be able to look “together” once more in my favourite harmonies of soft browns, creams and pinks. A dream of mine on my way to the office has come true at last; it’s a dream of a thick, clover-pink linen suit, with touches of heavy creamy lace in just the right places. In just the right places, too, it fits or falls away from me; and I don’t think even the feminine edition of Still Waters will be able to help being rather impressed by it!

As for Sydney Vandeleur, I know he would have said——

* * * * *

I’ve been wondering whether after all I need have sent that curt note to Sydney? Of course, I was furious with him, first for coming too late, and secondly for proposing at all after I was powerless to accept him—he didn’t know that; but what a position he put me into!

Could I have put an end to it? (My thoughts raced on with the train.)

Could I have written that very evening to Mr. Waters, cancelling that preposterous arrangement with him, returning that lump sum of salary, and saying——

Impossible! A hundred pounds of that salary had had to go, irrevocably, as soon as I got it. And already I’d broken into that remaining four hundred in the bank! I couldn’t make up even that.

How would it have been if when Sydney proposed to me, I had replied:

“I can’t see you. I can’t even tell you anything more, yet. But wait a year, and then ask me again”?

Since he’s “waited” so long——!

But no.

That wouldn’t have done either. It wouldn’t be keeping my bargain. It would be “giving away” my compact with that other, that detestable man, who trusts after all to my word—and after all, Sydney has got himself to thank for the fact that I haven’t been choosing a trousseau to please him....

Well! There’s nothing in this outfit, I hope, that won’t pass the censorship of the most critical glances in any big house—those of the servants. Men-servants, I suspect, are almost harder to “impress” than maid-servants.

But it was no lordly groom or supercilious chauffeur who met me at Sevenoaks Station as I stepped out of the train.

The tall, broad-shouldered figure that strode towards me looked, in a big, grey, loose motor-coat, so utterly different from the mind-picture of the slimly-built, dark, Vandyke-bearded young man that had travelled most of the way down with me, so different, too, from the other apparition I know only too well in immaculate “City” get-up, that at first I didn’t recognize him.

Then a cap was lifted. I saw the fair hair, brushed sleek as satin, and the keen, blonde face of my employer.

Several people on the platform were glancing at him as if he were almost as well known down here in the country as in Leadenhall Street.

Then eagerly inquisitive glances were turned to me. I caught a whisper of “Mr. William Waters’ young lady!” I wondered if the speaker—a prosperous-looking sort of butcher—expected to overhear some tender greeting? How “sold” he’d have been!

“Ah, there you are, Miss Trant!”—briskly as ever. “Good afternoon. What luggage have you? Porter, bring these things across to the car. I’m motoring you up to the house myself,” added Mr. Waters to me, as we left the station, “because there’s a little supplementary detail I wanted to ‘put you on to,’ so to speak, before you meet my people.”

“Oh, yes?” I said inquiringly, and I mentally reached for my pencil and pad.

But as I sat beside him on the comfortably padded seat with a lovely rug drawn up over my knees, and with a thick glass screen keeping my chic little new hat from getting blown about, I felt the pad-and-pencil side of my life slipping away from me as swiftly and steadily as the green hawthorn hedges that lined the road seemed slipping past this gliding car.

I had had a brute of a time just lately—now came the reaction. I suppose it was partly the entirely feminine sensation, thrilling every scrap of my body, that it was once more decently dressed! Partly, too, it was the influence of skimming over a country road again, breathing in untainted breezes under a blue sky with rolling white cauliflower clouds; having a whole smiling landscape to myself again!—for the moment I lost count of how this had happened. The thoughts of the last hour were left behind with those of the last two years—with the mean streets and the City smells and noises, and those Battersea rooms, and that utter lack of space and privacy, and that crushing sense of being just one unit out of millions that didn’t matter!

Before I’d experienced these things, I’d lived for nineteen years, another sort of life; and this seemed almost like coming home to it. I felt as if I were the fish that, having been left stranded on the proverbial gravel path, has somehow succeeded in flopping back to his native element.

I gave myself up to the luxury of the feeling—to the exhilarating rush through the clear air.

And I’d practically forgotten who was driving me, when his business-like voice sounded once more in my ear.

“Miss Trant! Your Christian name, as I saw by your note to my mother, is Monica?”

“Yes.”

I supposed he was now going to ask me if I had any objection to his addressing me thus as long as I was his mother’s guest. Why, of course, he’d have to! Just as I should have to bring myself to use his own name of “William.” (“Ahem! Wil-liam!” as Miss Robinson pronounced it pompously.) How queer to have to be asked to accord one’s Christian name under such terms! Really, he might have taken it as a matter of course that he must, for the next fortnight or so, call me “Monica.” Therefore I was rather taken aback by his next remark.

“I shall have to ask you if you would mind very much, while you are staying at The Lawn, being called ‘Nancy’?”

“Nancy!” I echoed, opening my eyes. “Oh, yes—no—I mean—anything you like; but why Nancy?”

Mr. Waters turned to me for a moment as the car sped smoothly down a level, empty stretch of the white highway.

“I’d better explain to you ‘why Nancy,’” he said dryly. In those keen grey eyes of his, where some time before I had suspected a gleam of humour, I now saw a quite unmistakable twinkle of fun!

There was even a twitch at the corner of those tightly-fitted lips. But he went on still more dryly. “When I informed my mother that I was engaged to be married to a lady in the office, she had a good many questions to put.”

(Well, I should think so! The Longer Catechism, in fact!) “Really?” I said meekly.

“And almost the first thing she asked me was what her Christian name was.”

(M’m, “almost”—I wonder what the very first thing was? What is it generally?)

“Of course, I ought to have foreseen that——”

(And hadn’t he? Good gracious! The mapped-out scheme with another flaw in it!)

—“but curiously enough, I’d overlooked it, and wasn’t prepared for it. Now, I couldn’t very well tell my mother the truth, namely, that I did not know. I have never been able to make out whether your usual initials were ‘M’ or ‘N.T.’ I had taken it for ‘N.’ So, on the spur of the moment, I gave her the first girl’s name that began with N that I could think of.”

N or M! Yes! Exactly like the catechism!

For the first time in my life in Still Waters’ presence I laughed aloud. Surely the country air and the rush through it in the car must have gone to my head. Amazed at myself, but even then laughing a little still, I pulled myself together to inquire, “And what did you say to Mrs. Waters when she received my note signed by my real name?”

“Oh!—I said—something or other about ‘Nancy’ being the usual abbreviation for ‘Monica’ in some places!”

“How quick of you!” I retorted—while my Near Oriental self sat back and gasped at my new boldness. He must have wondered at it too; thought it bravado, the recklessness of despair, I suppose.

“Something had to be said! And I am afraid, Miss Trant, that, for the matter in hand, ‘Nancy’ it will have to be. A sort of nom-de-guerre, you know—if you can call it ‘guerre.’”

He was actually laughing himself now. This made his face look at least ten years younger, changing him so that I felt him to be even more of a stranger to me than the machine-like autocrat who rapped out his “Now, Miss Trant!” and his “Take this down” at the Near Oriental. But in a moment he was serious again. He seemed, for the first time, to feel something of what I’ve been feeling ever since we’ve been—so to speak, “engaged.”

“It’s asking a good deal, but I have to trust to you to meet all these awkwardnesses as well as you can,” he said gravely. “And I’ll do all in my power to avoid them, I assure you. A good deal of the strangeness can be put down to the—er—natural shyness of people who are—so—er—recently engaged.”

“Oh, of course,” I murmured, struggling not to laugh any more.

But I wondered what other wild fictions about “Nancy” he’d had to improvise for his mother. Supposing she’d wanted to know what I was like to look at? Well, he wouldn’t know! Dark or fair—short or tall? As likely as not he’d tell her—as something had to be said—that I was six foot high and a radiant blonde. And what would she think of his not possessing a single photograph of me to show her? Really, he was almost benighted enough, since he’d given me another girl’s name, to pass off as mine another girl’s portrait!

Even as I was laughing to myself again, the car turned in at a stone-pillared entrance, and its plumply-tyred wheels purred on a perfectly-gravelled drive between tall laurel-hedges.

Oh! we were nearly there, then. I didn’t want to laugh any more. Now for it....

CHAPTER XI
MEETING “HIS” PEOPLE

We skirted what seemed like an ocean of green velvet turf. We swept round another corner.

“There’s the house,” announced Mr. Waters.

“That——?”

It was long and low and white and homely—yes! homely-looking—overgrown with purple wistaria, and swept at one end by a fountain of gold from an immense laburnum-tree. A deep, shady verandah was flung like a protecting arm about the waist of the house.

The late sunlight flashed on a scurry of something all goldeny-white, as there rushed out of the shade of this verandah what looked like a mix-up of several dogs and flying skirts....

“Girls?” I thought, as two slender, white-clad figures came towards me. “Who are these?”

“My sisters, Theodora and Blanche,” said the Governor quickly to me. “Down, Cariad! Down, sir,” to the little dog—there was only one of him, it appeared, when he stopped frisking for a moment about the man who was helping me to alight.

The taller of the two girls came forward first, murmured timidly, “So glad you’ve come!” held out both hands with an awkward, diffident little smile that was quite charming, and bent very shyly to kiss me. She was about eighteen, with fair hair, and features very cleanly-cut and something like her brother’s.

“I am Blanche,” she murmured. “This is Theo.”

“Theo,” seemed to be about fifteen. My first impression of her showed me a pair of long coltish legs and a round cowslip-bell of a head, covered with short yellow curls. She said nothing, but she looked, looked at me out of a pair of the largest and brightest brown eyes that I had ever met; they seemed almost the size of the goggles in a diver’s helmet, and I felt them following me devouringly as I was led into the hall.

“Here is Nancy, Mother,” called Mr. Waters.

Another figure came forward to meet me. This—his mother? A startling contrast indeed to what I’d pictured her. She was dressed in the soft, lacy, unshaped black that best suits an elderly lady; and her soft, puffed-out hair was grey all over. But that was as far as the “elderliness” of the Governor’s mother went. Her figure was as tall and seemed nearly as slender as Blanche’s; she had the long-armed, free movements that I’ve heard my father praise in Miss Ellen Terry; her face was pink and irregular-featured and mobile, her expression shy and smiling. She seemed like some girl who had fallen into a trance in the “Eighties,” from which she had just woken up to find that her hair was no longer brown, and that the world, which puzzled her a little, had gone on without her. Her voice was soft and hesitating, and full of unexpected half-tones.

“Oh, have you come? Nancy! You are so welcome, my dear! I called you ‘Miss Trant’ in my note, because I thought it was the right thing when I hadn’t ever seen you. But I needn’t go on being so stiff, need I? Billy said he thought I needn’t.”

The Governor had disappeared towards the car again.

“Your boxes have gone upstairs, dear, and you might like to rest before it’s time to get ready for dinner. Blanche will take you to your room,” added Mrs. Waters, holding back Theo, whose yellow head and whose long legs seemed just about to precipitate themselves after me—for that child to enjoy another good look, no doubt. “No, Cariad, you can’t go either! Come, Missis’s little dog”—the long white body was frolicking about just ahead of me. “He knows he never enters the house!”

And I knew the pet dogs who are supposed to cherish these rules. Cariad flung himself gleefully in front of the diffident, fair-haired Blanche as she escorted me upstairs.

We were on the landing when the sound of a voice that I hadn’t heard before, clear as a bell and distinct as a choir-boy’s solo, rang up to us from below.

“No won-der, Mother! Mother, I say, no won-der! Is-n’t she pretty? Billy never told us! He never——.”

Here an abrupt full-stop.

“Oh, I do hope you won’t mind Theo; she is rather awful sometimes,” murmured Blanche Waters, as apologetically scarlet as if she had done something to offend me. “She will say things—and so loud! It’s only because she’s so pleased—and she’s only thirteen really—it’s awful being so tall. People always expect you to be so much more sensible, somehow! This is your room.” She opened a white door. “Outside, Cariad! (He knows he never comes upstairs.) Do let me unpack for you, Nancy.”

“Oh! Thank you so much, but——”

I felt I must, must be left to myself for the present. At the risk of seeming ungracious, I added hastily, “I can manage, really!”

Even though I’m not fated to be a sister-in-law, I should like this nice girl to like me. So I smiled up at her, and she put out a long, rather bony young finger, and just touched my coat-collar. I realized that I needn’t have “fussed” so over my “trousseau.”

“Ah! I daresay you’re tired, too.”

“I am, rather.” (Strictly speaking, I am ready to drop, though not entirely with fatigue.)

“Then I’ll send up some hot water presently, Nancy. (Come, Cariad!)”

And she left me to what I felt I must have or perish—the solitude of my own room, leisure to gasp over the series of additional shocks I had just received.

* * * * *

First and foremost, though it seems a funny detail to push itself in front of all the other things, there’s “Billy!”

To think that Still Waters should be “Billy” to anyone—even if it’s only to his mother!

After Miss Holt’s “Do you ever call him Billy, by any chance?” and my solemn “Never!” to realize that the man who Miss Robinson vowed “could never have been anything so human as a little boy” does actually possess that characteristically little-boyish pet-name! And I suppose I shall be expected to call him that while I’m here? My goodness! “William” I was prepared for. “William,” with its touch of stiffness—and—stateliness, I might manage. But——Still, if I must, I must. In for a penny, in for a pound. (Only in this case it’s meant being in for five hundred pounds!)

And then that he should have that unexpected, that utterly uncharacteristic, that un-Waters-like sort of mother! Welcoming me like that! All I can say is that he—the Governor—must take after his father exactly!

And the house! Not in the least like a sarcophagus—or even the corner of the British Museum with Near Oriental fittings, as I’d pictured it!

Looking round this bedroom they’ve put me into, I see it’s exactly the sort that I’ve always loved, particularly since my lot has been cast in that poky little egg-box of a Battersea flat, with one skimpy strip of bedroom window giving on a view of grimy-grey back-yard, a kennel made out of a packing-case, and lines of washing hanging out to dry.

Here, at The Lawn, my quarters do seem so palatially big and airy! There’s miles of wardrobe space for my new things, I see. And what a lovely long mirror! That delicious scent of lavender and pot-pourri comes from the big china bowl on the window-ledge. There’s a wide bay of casement-windows looking out on to that wonderful lawn, sprays of feathery mauve wistaria tap against the panes outside. Inside, rose-peonies and giant tulips riot over the cream-and-red-and-pink-patterned chintzes of hangings and upholstery. The wallpaper is sprinkled with bouquets of rosebuds caught up with ribbons; and the bed-spread is of glowing rose-colour. No trace anywhere of those “Art-muds” and sad sage-greens that even well-off people get into their rooms so often now. Why can’t they realize that greens, to be successful, must be kept out of doors? Green as an indoor background, no! I’d have chosen just these gay, dainty patterns and colours for my bedroom, if——

But what’s the use of thinking over the house I might have had? I’m not going to. I ought to be breathlessly thankful that this one where I have to spend a fortnight is turning out to be so much more congenial than I’d hoped, and that “his” people are quite unlike “him!”

How suddenly “right” my dear old silver-and-crystal toilette things look against the setting of the Sheraton dressing-table with the plate-glass top! To think that one dismal wet day I nearly packed them all up and sent them off by Mrs. Skinner to be “put away,” and the price thereof turned into new boots! “Boots a poor typist must have,” I argued. “Silver-topped bottles and luxuries of that sort she doesn’t need any more.” How frightfully glad I am, now, that I hadn’t the heart to do it after all, that I sent my shoes to be re-soled instead—and that all my own monogrammed brushes are mirrored in the oval glass beside that lustre jar of rich, mahogany-coloured wall-flowers that, next to my own dark head and its moving reflections, seem to give the deepest touch of colour in the room. I suppose the girls put those there—Yes! That’s another shock. The sisters! That he should have sisters like——

A tap at the door.

“Come in!”

Enter, explosively, the excited little white dog, followed by a large and shiny copper can, and the eyes—they seem to dominate everything else about that child!—of Theodora.

“Brought you some hot water”—in a meek and muffled voice. “Dinner is—(Put those down, Cariad! He knows people’s slippers aren’t for him to eat!) Dinner is at eight. I’m not supposed to come down.”

Here the huge brown eyes turned ruefully for a moment from me to the gleaming sheath of the new frock that I’d just thrown over the brass rail of the bed. I guessed the thought behind them. They longed for another satisfying stare at it—on me.

Why shouldn’t I have this child fond of me?

“Shall I say good-night now, then, Theo?” I suggested. “Or—if you tell me which your room is, shall I come in after I’m dressed?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Theo, bell-mouthed. “Gem!” Then, carefully muffling the voice again, “That’s the school-room door opposite—between the corridor window and the picture of ‘Delia in Arcady.’ Thanks awf’ly, Nancy. (Come along, Cariad!)”

Not every engaged girl has such a walk-over with “his” people! But I think Theo would approve of me as a sister-in-law, if she were going to have the chance! I shouldn’t mind her!... On second thoughts, I don’t know whether I am so pleased after all that these people are so kind and welcoming and different from what I had expected.

Wouldn’t it be almost easier for me in some ways if his mother and his sisters were the “collection of frosty-faces” (as Miss Robinson expresses it) whom I’d anticipated meeting? I was prepared; I could have coped with them. Why has he got sisters like these—just the kind of girls I could imagine sisters of mine?

Why must his mother be so sweet to me, without a gleam of the “designing-little-minx-of-a-typist” look in her eyes, without—I verily believe—a thought of it in her heart? Ready to take to her arms the stranger within her gates whom she looks upon as her son’s lady-love—oh, it’s too embarrassing!

For the first time since this sham engagement was arranged between my employer and myself, I feel what I did not feel when I confronted my fellow-typists, the Vandeleurs or Cicely with the news that I was Mr. Waters’ fiancée; what I did not feel when I first slipped these lying diamonds on to my finger; what I didn’t feel when I cabled that money to Jack, or even when I wrote to Sydney.

I feel—there is no other word to express it—downright mean!

How am I going to stand a whole fortnight of it? How am I to keep up this incessant pose and pretence under the gentle, unsuspecting eyes of Mrs. Waters?

I believe I could have calmly invented fib after fib for the benefit of Lady Vandeleur——

Now, now! Thoughts beginning with “Vandeleur” have got to be sternly suppressed unless I mean to give myself a fit of the blues and make some terrible faux pas presently, at dinner, in the bosom of the Governor’s family.

So come, Monica Trant, my child—“Nancy,” I mean, of course, Nancy! (How I hope I shall remember to answer to that name when I hear it, instead of forgetting who they mean and imagining it’s the little white dog!) You pull yourself together, Nancy, and dive into the pretty new evening-frock—it will be gorgeous to have proper lights and a real glass to dress by once again!—then go and show it off to that avid-eyed child in the school-room. And then downstairs with you, to earn some more of your five hundred pounds!

CHAPTER XII
THE FIRST DINNER

Well! the first evening is over.

It hasn’t been nearly as bad as it might, though it certainly has produced several more quite unexpected developments.

We dined; for the first time for well over a year I sat down at a luxuriously-appointed round dinner-table with all its conventional daintiness of perfect napery, silver and glass—instead of the picnic-supper affair, with every single plate and fork an “oddment,” cast by the hands of Mrs. Skinner upon the rickety table at Marconi Mansions. Instead of gossiping with Cicely Harradine clad in the faded green Japanese kimono that she finds “such a rest to slop into” after all the fashionable dressing-up at Chérisette’s—for Cicely is rather the type of girl whom work demoralizes instead of bracing—I was of a party of two other women and a man in evening-dress.

That dinner-jacket does make the Governor look so much younger—it’s positively laughable! For another thing, it seems to take him right out of his isolated Near Oriental niche, and to put him in the same rank of human beings as men who used to dine at our house when my father was alive. Positively, I have begun to look upon my once-dreaded employer as quite an ordinary—though certainly not a likable—sort of young man! Never again need he expect to keep up, with me, the attitude of a metallic species of Business-deity who disappears after business-hours to some vague, chilly and unknown Olympus, of which no glimpse would ever be vouchsafed to any of us, his grovelling subordinates. Oh, no!

Not now that I’ve seen his people, the pretty things out of which his mother has made such a nest of a home for him; not after making the acquaintance of Blanche and of that gift of God, Theodora, and of Cariad. That little outdoor dog spent the whole of dinner-time cosily curled up under the table on his “Missis’s” black satin skirt, and not all the flappings of the Governor’s table-napkin or his curtest “Here! Out of that, Cariad! Outside, sir!” had the slightest effect in dislodging him. I would have given at least five of my as yet unearned five hundred pounds for Miss Robinson to have been granted the sight of Still Waters cheerfully defied by that small Sealyham! I can see her “potting” the scene, with Miss Holt’s white feather neck-ruffle commandeered to represent the little dog who “knows that skirts aren’t there for him to sit upon!” And I’m not “there to be sat upon” any more, either! I’m beginning to wonder how the Governor managed to “take me in” for so long! Why, he is a regular fraud! And a fraud found out is never terrifying—even if it’s exasperating.

If anyone is going to be alarmed now, it’s not his official fiancée, but he himself; for he was—yes, positively!—nervous and embarrassed at dinner. If that had been the first time I’d met him I should have thought that the big and blonde and silent young man opposite was deadly shy of me! Of me; after all that he had handed out to me in the way of orders and commands and arrangements during the past fortnight. It is a good thing if, as he says, a good deal of the “strangeness” will be put down to the “natural awkwardness of people so recently engaged”—but it’s a still better thing that I contrived to be rather less “awkward” and speechless than he was! To myself I seemed to be sitting a little apart, watching another Mon—Nancy, I mean—smiling and chatting gaily with his mother and the younger girls.

What dears they are! and how one sees their feminine touch in everything about the room, from the arrangement of the many and becoming lights, to the graceful massing of sulphur-coloured pansies and gypsophila in the centre of the round table!

At dinner it was chiefly, I think, of flowers that we talked—such a nice, safe subject. It seems that the Governor is actually interested in gardening. How amazed the staff would be if it were hinted that Still Waters took the vaguest gleam of interest in anything outside making money for the firm!

After dinner, when he remained behind in the dining-room to smoke, his mother slipped one white hand into Blanche’s arm, the other into mine; and the gesture, I know, was meant to imply that she had “another daughter now.”

We stepped together across the black-and-white-tiled hall into the drawing-room, with its ordered chaos of pretty, old-fashioned furniture and dainty new things, and the unmistakable atmosphere of a homey room that is lived in.

Mrs. Waters drew me down beside her on the wide, shallow sofa, and I saw her eyes dwelling on every line of my face, as if she were trying to learn fresh knowledge of her son from the girl who presumably was permitted to see him as his own mother never sees a man.

That brought a lump into my throat. I bent my head over my work—a bit of Richelieu embroidery with which I had taken care to provide myself. I had remembered some axioms of Miss Robinson at the office:

“Never you be without a hit of fancy-work, girls, when you wish to impress. Men seem to think a girl must be so sweet and womanly who can sit for hours wagging a crochet-hook and a bit of thread at them. As for the future mother-in-law, she always imagines a girl is more likely to turn out domesticated if she cannot keep her hands still for ten minutes. Besides, a bit of drawn-thread work, or whatever it is, gives you something to look at when you don’t exactly know what to say next.”

The last reason was mine. I certainly did not know what to say when the Governor’s mother remarked softly:

“You know, Nancy, you are just what I hoped you would be.”

“Am I?”

I felt an unutterable little cad.

Yes, Mr. William Waters! And who forced me into the position of feeling like this?

“So pretty and gentle and quiet, and yet you ‘see’ things with those brown eyes of yours,” pronounced Mrs. Waters. “At first I feared it was impossible that any girl who had only met my boy just in business-hours, and wearing that office-mask he has to put on, could grow to care for him as we do; but I see you could understand. You guessed that all that brusqueness and peremptory manner were just the armour for his sensitiveness; you would see that he has to put on that manner to hide the awful truth that at the bottom of his heart he is naturally as shy and nervous as Blanche and I are. I believe,” she laughed softly, “that that’s why he never allows us to call at the office while we’re in town! The staff might suspect, seeing us, that he has another sort of manner than the terrible one he speaks through the telephone with! I dare say that even you were taken in by it at first, weren’t you? Until he began to reveal his real self to you, I expect you looked upon him merely as a business-machine, didn’t you, Nancy?”

“I suppose I did,” I murmured, feeling more uncomfortable at every word uttered by this dear, innocent lady, who had created such an idealized version of her son’s character.

“And when did you begin to find out the real Billy?”

Here was a nice question! Thank goodness I was spared the answering of it!

At that moment the drawing-room door opened to admit the tallest of the admirable parlour-maids, with the tray bearing a silver coffee-machine and the dainty Dresden service.

Blanche rose from the cushion where she had been sitting at my feet, and went to the table to officiate. In her simple white dinner-gown she looked like a tall lily bending down.

“Mother, plenty of hot milk and a little sugar? Nancy, how do you like your coffee?”

“I don’t take it, thank you very much.”

“Oh, then here’s Billy’s—black, with plenty of sugar. Will he be coming in for it?”

Her mother gave a little smile.

“I think perhaps Nancy won’t mind taking in Billy’s coffee to him. Will you, dear? He’s in his ‘den’; the door just opposite, across the hall.”

Even without her gently mischievous glance I should have realized what she meant. The unsuspecting, sympathetic creature thought she was being kind and tactful, making an opportunity for me to have a little time alone with my fiancé.

She imagined that we were longing for a lovers’ tête-à-tête, with all the fond, foolish talk that one could guess at—beaming smiles at each other, like Smithie’s—Ordinary love-making! Yes, of course, people will have to be allowed to think that there’s that between us, too. I hadn’t wasted many thoughts on this aspect of the case. But this “rubbed it in.”

I felt a wave of scorching scarlet rush up my face to the roots of my hair. However, that didn’t matter: no doubt Mrs. Waters put it down to the “natural shyness” of a girl in love. She never guessed the furious mixture of feelings that sent that blush into my cheeks.

I kept my head up and my voice quite steady as I replied: “Oh, certainly!”

And I rose, taking up the green-garlanded cup with the small gilt apostle-spoon in the saucer, and left the drawing-room to face my first official tête-à-tête with the Governor.

Ever since he’s been the unconscious cause of my having had to give up the chance of a serene and happy future with the man who really cares for me, I’ve looked upon my employer with a mixture of resentment and dread. As I say, the dread’s melted rapidly. But the resentment’s growing!

“I’ll make him pay, somehow,” thought I revengefully, “for all this!” By “all this” I meant not only for the loss of Sydney, and the castle at Ballycool, and comfort and position, but for making me look and feel so acutely foolish before Mrs. Waters.

“I’ll see if I can’t make him rather uncomfortable over it himself,” I determined.

I crossed the hall, forcing myself to feel as if I were back in the office, where we typists took it in turn to carry Mr. Dundonald’s cup of afternoon tea into the inner sanctum, where he glowered over his figures.

(How cross he was if one of us shook the cup so that some of the tea slopped over and soaked the lump of sugar and the biscuit laid in the saucer.)

Gingerly I carried the dainty cup of black coffee across to the door of the “den.”

There, deliberately, I tapped twice.

The sound of my knock on the door reminded me of another occasion—on which I’d presented myself alone before the Governor, that afternoon at the Near Oriental; that first interview in his office.

This tête-à-tête—the first in his own home—was going to be very different!

CHAPTER XIII
THE FIRST TÊTE-À-TÊTE

A rather surprised voice called “Come in!”

In I went—to find the Governor smoking a cigarette and sitting on the wide red-leather-padded club-fender of a room that was in complete contrast to the feminine domain I had left. Almost empty, but for its tall bookshelves, a grandfather’s clock, a couple of solid, “man-ny-looking” arm-chairs and a grand piano.

I dropped my voice into its meekest Near Oriental tone as I announced:

“Your coffee, Mr. Waters!”

It was exactly the tone in which I’d so often said, “Your tea, Mr. Dundonald!” and yet I knew that the man before me would guess that this deference was, under the circumstances, only a subtle form of defiance.

I handed him the cup. Then I stood there, outwardly as mild as milk, before him. One swift glance into the mirror over the mantelpiece beyond his broad shoulder—his shoulders are the best thing about him—had shown me an attractive picture enough—a big, blonde man faced by a petite, graceful girl, with her night-black hair swathed in a silky garland round her head, and her white shoulders and neck emerging from an admirably-cut dinner-gown of creamy charmeuse and chiffon patterned by rose-pink beadwork, whose colour echoed the soft flush in her cheeks.

Just before dinner, Theo, in the school-room, with all her eyes and half the voice-power at her command, had told me the dress was divine, and that I looked a little angel in it!

“Angel?” H’m. That wasn’t how I felt, exactly. Still I know I looked my best; as pretty as ever I’d looked in the dear old days before I had anything else to do.

Looking her best always keys a girl up to doing her best.

(Or her worst, as the case may be.)

Besides, another glance at the Governor had shown me that I’d been right in my suspicion at dinner. He was embarrassed. He was—probably for the first time in his life—shy!

This put the finishing touch to my feeling myself to be—also for the first time—mistress of this situation.

Therefore, I stood there, still waiting, looking as if it were I who were paralysed with shyness, deliberately waiting for him to speak.

“Thank you,” he had murmured as he took the cup from me. There was another pause, which was—as I fully intended—the first of many. Then he added, in a rather uncertain sort of voice, “I suppose it was my mother’s—my mother who sent you in here?”

“Yes! Oh, yes,” I said hastily, as if breathlessly flurried and meek beyond all words. “She seemed to think—I didn’t know what else to do—am I in your way?” (Here I glanced up at him with scared, appealing eyes as much as to say, “Is it my fault if I am?”)

Pause.

“I am afraid,” said the Governor, rather as if the words were forced from him, “that I shall have to ask you to put with up this—er—incongruity for the next half-hour or so. Won’t you sit down, Miss Trant?” And he wheeled forward one of those capacious arm-chairs, placing it at a mercifully wide distance from the fender-stool—where Mrs. Waters perhaps imagined we were at that moment sitting—Oh shade of everything that’s wildly impossible!—sitting together like ordinary young engaged people, hand in hand—or however they do sit. My goodness!

I sat down, dropping my eyes demurely, and folding my hands in my lap.

Another pause.

“I—er——” said the Governor, then stopped and tried to look as if he hadn’t begun a sentence.

“Yes? Is there anything that I can—that you think I ought to be able to do for you while I am here, Mr. Waters?”

“Perhaps it might be wiser if you stopped calling me by that name”—dryly. He seemed to have pulled himself together with a jerk, for he was looking and speaking more like himself at this. However, it had no effect on me.

“Oh, of course,” I said obediently, “I shall always remember to call you B——by your Christian name (that is an abbreviation, too, isn’t it?) when we are with the others.”

“And then, if you use my other name when we are alone, you may forget, and let it slip out when the others are here,” he objected, looking down on me from his perch on the fender-stool, “and—and it’s more than likely that my sisters might notice. Theodora notices everything.”

“Yes”—gently—“so I gather.”

“And always says out what she thinks,” her brother informed me. “That’s why—if you don’t mind—I am going to continue calling you ‘Nancy’ even when we are alone.”

“Oh, certainly,” I said softly. “And I suppose I must practise trying not to feel afraid of you.”

He looked sharply at me, but I know there was no expression in my face, and my eyes seemed fixed upon the hands in my lap, upon the ring I was turning, idly, round my engagement-finger.

“Afraid of me?” he took up. “You?”

“Oh, Mr. Waters—I beg your pardon, I didn’t mean to use that name again. I was going to say, you know that we are all terrified to death of you—at the office.”

I know he guessed that I meant “but this is not the office, and I’ve lost all the wholesome awe that I still had of you only yesterday, and I’m no more terrified of you than Cariad is, now!” Without looking directly at him, I saw his keen, blonde face flush a little under its tan—this City-fied young man is oddly sunburned—and his firmly-fitted lips moved as if he were going to say something but thought better of it. After a pause he opened them again and asked:

“Do you smoke—er—Nancy?”

“No, thanks very much,” I said primly.

Silence fell.

The Governor cleared his throat.

I knew he literally couldn’t think what to say next, and I exulted inwardly. I felt as if I really were getting a little of my own back now—not only for the awkwardness and unpleasantness due to the “engagement,” but for everything I’ve loathed while I’ve been at the Near Oriental—the dreary journey there morning after morning, the monotony, the irksomeness, the daily looming terror of “the sack,” the hated hoverings round me of Mr. Dundonald and his “talk-ing!”

Oh, how my employer was longing for me to “talk” at that moment! to say something—anything!

But I wouldn’t. I think I could have let that lagging silence last for quite another five minutes as far as I was concerned, only I was afraid I might break into wild laughter unless I spoke. So I gave it up, and suggested gravely and helpfully:

“I have got some fancy-work with me, but I left it in the drawing-room. Shall I go back and fetch it? Or—wouldn’t that quite do?”

“Afraid not,” said the Governor grimly.

“It seems so stupid to sit here doing nothing; for you, too,” I added sympathetically. “If you have brought any letters down here from the office, you might, perhaps, care to dictate them to me——”

“Thank you, no,” said Mr. Waters firmly. “I seldom do any business out of business-hours.”

I turned my ring again ostentatiously. I hope he knew I was pointing out to him how my “business” had to go on all day long—the woman’s work, in fact, being never done!

My next mild suggestion was, “Do you play picquet?”

“Don’t know one card from another.”

I sighed, as if with mingled regret and boredom.

It was a very insincere sigh! for, to begin with, I loathe any form of card-playing myself; I don’t believe the story that cards were invented to please a mad king. I believe he was driven mad by the card-games of the period! Secondly, I wasn’t one bit bored. I was revelling in the spectacle of this wretched young man—imagine being able to employ such a phrase to the Grand Panjandrum himself!—this wretched young man looking so acutely uncomfortable and at such a loss.

Gleefully I allowed yet another long and awkward pause to take place.

Then, I put my hand—the left one—up to my mouth as if to stifle a yawn. Then I glanced at the ship in full sail that rocked to and fro on the face of the grandfather’s clock, and murmured resignedly: “Only twenty minutes past nine?”

“I am afraid that clock is always kept ten minutes fast,” said my host.

I sighed again, more deeply.

Then I allowed my eyes to wander, as if vainly seeking the way of escape!—round the comfortable, masculine-looking room. Actually, my glance was caught by an odd-looking arrangement of wires across the ceiling.