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:

Now I have written; and pretty quickly too.

There!