“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!