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!