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:

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....