This morning I was just finishing dressing when I heard a blackbird’s whistle, two or three times repeated, just outside my window.

It interrupted my meditations on a rather interesting subject.

Namely: What was my employer going to say to me to-day about that episode last night?

How—in what spirit, in what words, would he make his apology?

Of course I know that for the offence of having kissed a girl who is nothing to him there is no apology a man can make. The mere suggestion of apologizing for that is adding insult to injury. The only possible excuse is to say: “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I couldn’t help myself”—allowing an unspoken—“and I’d do it again if I had the chance” to be interpreted by the tone in which it was spoken.

However, that was quite out of the question here, seeing that there had been no kiss of that sort in the affair. The offence, however, was just as inexcusable; more so. To have kissed me on the hair—why, even as I took up my brushes before the glass this morning I saw the reflection of another angry wave of scarlet in my face brought there by the memory which can’t be just brushed away.

It might not have been so infuriating if it hadn’t been the first time....

For I’d never before allowed any man to attempt such a thing. I’ve always known that one ought to stick to what Lady Mary Wortley-Montague says in that little poem:

I remembered that last night, as I lay awake; remembered quoting it to Cicely Harradine. She had laughed and turned rather pink—this was after some dance we’d both been to at the Slade—and had said, “Yes, Tots dear; that is so sweet—and so awfully true, of course; only—it was in the eighteenth century, dear, wasn’t it? and isn’t it rather what you call ‘a Counsel of Perfection?’”

It oughtn’t to be so—it needn’t have been so for me, but now—that’s all been spoilt—and by him!

What can he say about it?

“Nothing else for it—my uncle’s doing.”—Yes, but I’ve got all my answers for that excuse.

“I was goaded into it by having had such an awful evening; felt I must do something outrageous.” Yes, but not that! I had had an awful evening too! And I hadn’t wanted to kiss anybody!

“Hadn’t time to think of anything else.”

Nonsense! A business man with his wits sharpened by daily interviews with other sharp-witted people for whose benefit he has to think out, even while he’s speaking, excuses, schemes, promises, goodness knows what! Oh, he’d have to say something more convincing than that to me!

Again I heard the whistle—a monotonous note for a blackbird’s! Then came a sharp tap at my opened, latticed, wistaria-garlanded casement. A pebble had been flung up against it.

This gave me quite a little jump; it brought back old days at home; when Sydney, staying in the house, had wanted to bring me out for a stroll before breakfast.

“Must be Theo,” I said aloud to myself. But something told me it wasn’t. I looked out. Yes. There on the gravel beneath, in a blue serge suit that seemed to make his sleek head shine quite golden in the morning sunshine, stood my employer, looking up.

Waiting for me to come out? Throwing stones up to catch my attention? Who taught him that?

“Good morning,” he said quietly. “Will you come down when you are ready?”

I nodded as ungraciously as I could, and drew back at once. I was quite ready, but I stopped dead-still by the wardrobe glass for a long moment, letting him wait. Then I turned to the door.

Then I came back again.

I took the shadiest hat I’ve got out of its drawer and pulled it down firmly over my hair, stabbing it on with my swastika hatpin, my hand-wrought silver one that Sydney designed for me, my two mounted regimental buttons of father’s, and my little pearl-headed one. I daresay my head did look all bristling with spikes, like the Statue of Liberty’s. But if I’d had more pins I’d have stuck them all in! And even if I do, like Blanche and Theo, usually go about hatless in the gardens, I was going to use all the “cover” I could to meet the Governor’s apology, whatever it might be. For now he was going to have his work cut out for him! And whatever he began to say about last night’s brusque, snatched kiss, I wasn’t going to help him out by one syllable. I could wait. Let him explain; floundering about for words, probably, as he hasn’t floundered yet! Feeling most satisfactorily composed myself, I came down the stairs. One of the maids, in china-blue print, moved aside a dust-pan for me to pass.

Then I saw something that ruffled me again.

In that dust-pan there was a handful of pink, crystallized rose-leaves and a couple of tiny silver horseshoes—Theodora’s “confetti!” It must have dropped out of the draping of my skirt as I rushed upstairs—was there no getting away from last night?—and I know that there was something more than well-trained civility in that girl’s smiling “Good morning, Miss Nancy!”

Why can’t they say “Miss Trant”? Do they consider it isn’t worth while for so short a time, as they think?—Hateful household!

I had only just unruffled myself again as I faced the Governor in the sunshine outside.

“Come in here, won’t you?” he said, holding open the little white gate under the rambler arch of the rose-garden.

It was just then a bouquet of warm, scented colour, shading down from the deepest damask of the bed of Jeune Amours, through the rosy, straggling Baroness von Ulks and the faintly-flushed Cuisses des Nymphes to the dead-white Frau Karl Druschkis—such a rose-garden, such an earthly paradise for a before-breakfast stroll—alone!

Side by side we paced slowly down to the end of the box-bordered path between the pink Maman Cochets (another echo of last night!) before another word was said.

Then he began. “I wanted to have this opportunity of saying something to you.”

His tone was conciliatory, quiet. The expression of his face was—well, not in the least his mask of office-hours, nor the scowling barricade he put up at last night’s dinner-table; but guarded and absolutely non-committal.

So was mine, I hope.

I waited for him to go on.

“I may tell you,” he went on, “that I’ve been regretting—”

Last night, I supposed? A curious way of putting it!

—“regretting for some time that it was you I asked to take on this—this situation for me.”

“Oh!”

We turned and walked back again.

“I mean,” he added quietly, “that I regret having dragged a girl of your kind, more sensitive and spirited than I had imagined—”

What had he imagined, then?

—“into this affair.”

“Oh.”

“I—I suppose I ought to have known better than to ask—you.”

“Oh,” I said, for the third time, and I meant to stop there. But somehow I couldn’t help going on rather acidly, “And which of your other employees do you wish you had asked instead? Miss Robinson?”

(Who would have been provided with material for impersonations of the family Waters for the rest of her life.)

—“Or Miss Holt?”

(She, I know, would have screamed aloud when he inflicted that extraordinary kiss upon her!)

“Miss Smith, of course, has her affections otherwise engaged——”

“Ah? And so that would have been a barrier, would it? Even to this kind of an affair?” retorted the Governor, very quickly and looking hard at me.

I knew what he meant. He was thinking of the Major’s clumsy bringing-up, yesterday, of the name of Sydney Vandeleur.

So I lifted my eyes, which had been idly studying the grey pattern of shadow flung by a trellised rose-arch upon my creamy skirt, and I looked the Governor firmly in the face as I said quietly:

“I imagine so.”

Then he said, “Oh.”

And then there was another pause.

Surely Mr. Waters could not break it by anything else, now, than by coming to the point—saying whatever it was he meant to say about his behaviour at the door of the den? But nothing of the kind.

“You quite understand, then, that I am sorry—for bringing you into all this?” he began again. “Right. Now, I suppose I ought to offer to release you from the arrangement.”

“Yes?” I looked up again quickly, hopefully.

“Only, you see, I can’t,” my employer concluded, slowly. “I can’t do that. The—er—my—the reason which forced me into it is—still there.”

“Oh.”

Another turn. This time towards the pergola.

“Another thing,” he went on—and this time I really did think I knew what was coming next. “About last night.”

I didn’t say, “Oh”—I simply waited for whatever apology he thought fit to make.

“Last night, in the drawing-room before dinner. I’m afraid I was rather rude.”

“Before dinner?” I echoed, forgetting what could have happened then.

“Yes; when you were asking me about that place in Wales, Porth Cariad,” he said. “I told you, rather off-handedly, I’m afraid, that there was ‘a wooden woman’ there.”

“Oh, yes!”

“Well, there is. It’s the figure-head of a ship, some vessel that was wrecked in the bay, years ago,” explained the Governor quite simply. “They’ve put it up beyond the two cottages there, on the cliff. I ought to have explained that at the time.”

Well! And wasn’t there anything else he had to explain? With all these “Oh’s” and pauses, he was a long, long time in coming to that unjustifiable kiss—and yet something convinced me that his mind was full of it even while he mentioned these other things first.

“Besides that,” he went on deliberately, “there’s something I was thinking over last night, for quite a time before I went to sleep.”

Ah! At last!

“I wanted to suggest——” he was saying, when, from behind the leafy screen of the pergola there came a booming cry of:

“Aha! Here they are! here they are! Might have known what they were at! Love among the roses, eh?”

And in another moment there hove into view the rotund, white-waistcoated form and the rosy John Bull face, smiling under the light grey, dented felt hat, of Uncle Albert Waters.

Beaming and rubbing his hands, he advanced upon us.

“Now, young people, young people! Breakfast’s ready! Didn’t hear the gong, eh? No, of course not. Something better to listen to, as I said. I heard you, Billy! I heard you whistling under her window half an hour ago! Something worth while being an early bird for now, what? But come along.”

He slipped one arm into his nephew’s, the other into mine, and wheeled us round towards the house.

“I told your mother I’d come out myself and fetch you in!”

Perfectly unconscious that if wishes could have killed he must have fallen down shrivelled to a cinder on the garden path, he rolled on happily between us towards the French windows of the dining-room, prattling robustiously all the way.

“Nothing comes up to that nine-o’clock-in-the-morning smell of bacon and coffee, does it? Smells far better than it tastes, they say! Which reminds me that I once heard a young lady, Nancy, my dear—only she was a cynical young person, not nearly so pretty—I heard her say that the best part of frizzling bacon was like Love—all in the anticipation! Never tasted as good as it promised to, so to speak! Of course you don’t agree with her?”

“No, oh, no!” I cried hastily, partly because I felt I must disagree with somebody, partly because I realized that the inevitable effect of this detestable old man upon his nephew was to strike him dumb when he ought to have spoken!

“Ah, quite right, quite right!” responded Uncle Albert, with an affectionate pressure of my arm in his. “That’s the attitude! I don’t believe in this modern plan of analysing everything down to nothing, do you?”

“Hate it,” I said viciously—meaning that I hated having my arm squeezed by horrible relations-in-law never-to-be.

“I see you do! Good! My dear, I’m delighted to find that Billy’s sweetheart sees eye to eye with Billy’s uncle on so many points. That’s why I’m taking you out this morning—Oh, yes! you too, my boy! Not going to separate the turtle-doves!—going to take you both out if you can beg mother off from church. I’m going to motor you over—not a hundred miles away, and show you something—Aha! Something that I fancy you will approve of as much as I do!”

“Heavens! What will this new horror turn out to be?” thought I; catching the same question in the Governor’s eye as we entered the dining-room, where the family, including Cariad, was already at breakfast, and sat down to the coffee and bacon of old Mr. Waters’ disgusting metaphor. We weren’t long spared the answer to that question.

“Now, Mary! I’ve just been telling our two young people here,” began Uncle Albert almost at once, “that they’re going over in the car with me this fine morning to look at something I particularly want them to see. Now, I’ll give you three guesses what it is—No, I won’t—”

(Interrupting Theo, who had leapt up in her chair with a shriek of “Wedding presents! That picture!”)

“—I want the pleasure of telling you myself. Picture? No, child. Something to put the picture in—to be the picture in, ho, ho! It’s a house to let!”

“A house!” murmured Blanche, clasping her hands, and obviously seeing herself helping to arrange the flowers in it.

“A charming house, only fifteen miles from here. Just the place for Billy and his Nancy to settle down in when they get married,” enlarged the elderly enfant terrible. “In fact, once they’ve seen it, they’ll want to motor on and order that special licence at once, I shouldn’t wonder!”

Mercy! I turned my eyes to Mrs. Waters, as if imploring her help to change the conversation; she only nodded and smiled and murmured: “Pretty blouse—I always like you in lacy white things, Nancy!”

There was no checking Uncle Albert; on he went:

“I was looking at the place only last week, and it’s still going! There’s a rose-garden, my dear, almost as prettily arranged as the one here that you were billing and cooing in just now. And a splendid vegetable garden for the more practical side of life. South aspect!—Very excellent fish-curry, Mary—Nice, airy bedrooms! And”—his voice took on an impressive rallentando—“Now, what do you think? A little—a little white wicket-gate at the top of the stairs! That’s the crowning touch, eh?”

Yes. It was.

“That was what took my fancy, you know! I immediately said to myself——”

At all costs, I felt, must Uncle Albert be kept from repeating what he had said to himself.

“Yes—But, Mr. Waters,” I interrupted wildly, “I’m so afraid that that house wouldn’t—couldn’t do for us!”

“What, my dear! Why not? If you only see it, you’ll say as I did——”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly lovely,” I burst in; “but the fact of the matter is that we—we have arranged to live in London”—“and in separate houses for ever,” I might have added. I went on improvising rapidly. “You see, we shall have a town house for most of the year, and for the summer we’re looking round for a sort of—of farmhouse, with two cottages by the sea, you know! In—in Anglesey, I think. I am so fond of—of that part of the country, so—Those were our plans, aren’t they?” I concluded, with one reckless “Say so, do!” glance at the Governor.

“Yes—rather! That’s what we’d thought of!” he returned, with a glance back at me which betrayed something very like pure gratitude.

As well it might!

For again, just before I spoke, my employer had been at such an utter loss that—for the first time since I’d seen him, I felt positively sorry for him.

And I answered his glance with the tiniest nod of encouragement.

They were the first friendly signals that had ever passed between us.

“Look here. I must speak to you.”

This was my employer, hurriedly to me after breakfast, in the veranda. Now, as that deep, shady veranda is built all the way round the house, as every one of the windows gives on to it, and as all the windows are always wide open, I couldn’t help giving a look round it as much as to say, “Here?”

“Not here,” he muttered, still more hurriedly. “This seems to be the deuce of a house to talk in—never saw such a place. And there’s no time now. My uncle was going to take us along in the car——”

“Must we go?” I asked, softly and ruefully, with my back to one of the pillars.

“No. I’ve knocked that on the head—I’m going to take him off by myself to play golf. I said you’d really rather go to church with my mother and the girls.”

“Oh, thanks so much,” I said fervently. “I certainly would!”

“So I thought. Well, then, we shall be lunching at the Club House—or, anyhow, getting lunch somewhere out—not coming back here.”

I nearly said, “Thanks, so much!” once more.

I also nearly smiled to think that anyone else, catching sight of the two of us talking so quickly, so quietly, and so close together under the soft mauve fringe of wistaria-blossom that drooped from the glazed roof, might easily have imagined that our conspiracy was how to spend most of this glorious Sunday together, instead of apart!

“We might not even be back for tea,” said the Governor.

“And when is——” I paused and turned my eyes towards the house, “going?”

“Six o’clock train back to town this evening,” said the Governor, looking steadily at me.

A “Thank goodness!” remained unuttered on the tip of my tongue, as I felt obliged to say, “I hope he didn’t think it odd of me not to want to see”—I brought it out with a jerk—“that house.”

“Oh, no! He seemed rather bucked, really, to hear that—well, that we were so far on in our plans. Anglesey, you know, and so on,” said the Governor, in an expressionless voice as I turned quickly away.

For I’d caught the heralding whiff of a cigar round the corner! Also, I wanted to be safely in my own room, getting ready for church, just at the time that those two men would be setting out for the links.

My employer took one step after me.

“This evening, then?—I mean, for what I was going to say to you.”

Ah. That interrupted apology weighed on his mind.

“Very well,” I said. “Good-bye.”

And I drew a breath of relief to think of the whole blessed Day of Rest before me.

Even Church, however, wasn’t without its slight reminder of the situation.

I was feeling rested, soothed, lulled—and, I am afraid, not strictly attentive—when my attention was caught, first by Theo’s moist palm being thrust into mine, much as Cariad thrusts his nose, and then by a phrase in the voice of the officiating curate:

“I publish the banns of marriage between——”

Banns, of course! Of course they must needs publish banns on this particular Sunday and in this particular church! thought I, rather pettishly. Well, I supposed it wasn’t really the Governor’s fault! and that there are banns read every week! The next words I heard were:

“Also of Leonard Harris, bachelor—”

Ah! I knew his name; it was the young man from the Waters’ butcher, who, as I had already been told, was to marry the prettiest of the maids at The Lawn, the one who was sweeping the stairs this morning.

—“and Ethel Mary Bell, spinster, both of this parish.”

Both absurdly happy, probably, in a “Smithie” kind of way. I wondered if “he” were red and greasy, like so many butchers? Whether he’d leave “her” at home while he went and sat all the evening in the “Spotted Dog”?

My young man—I suppose to some people the Governor would be my “young man”—isn’t that sort. Not that it need make the slightest difference to me if he were! I needn’t worry about the sort of husband he’ll make—to someone else.

“Also between——”

What a lot of engaged couples! Six, at least, were “called” to-day. And I wondered about each of those six engaged girls.... Which of them had bloomed out into what books call “this strange new happiness that had come to her” on HIS account, and which of them just wanted to be “engaged” for its own sake?

For supposing an engagement were stripped of all its glamour of importance? Yes, my dears! Take away the delight of discussing, with other girls, the possibilities of finest nainsook and torchon. Take away the chance of growing positively left-handed from showing off “his” ring. Take away the joy of being, instead of an unattended wallflower at dances and parties, always more or less of a guarded treasure. Take away that feeling of being at one and the same time much younger, much older and much better-looking. Take away the comforting conviction that now you needn’t fret about what’s to become of you when you grow passÉe and “long in the tooth,” as Major Montresor unkindly calls various ex-favourites of his own. Take all those “extras” away—and what remains of your pride and joy in HIM alone? There’s a sum for the “really” engaged girl. I can’t help feeling I can guess how it would work out in—say, four cases out of six!

Perhaps I’m wrong.... Perhaps the whole six of them would still go on feeling that their unparalleled engagement had caused the sun to rise upon a new heaven and a brand-new earth. But it’s odds, long odds, against any one of the six having an “affair” in the least like—mine.

And the curate went on reading out names.

“Also——”

“Between William Waters, bachelor, of this parish,” breathed his younger sister in a gusty whisper, “and Nancy Monica Trant, spinster—of the parish of what, Nancy?”

“S-sh! Theo!” I whispered, still wondering about those banns.... Would it come to that? Would my employer feel himself obliged, before our twelve-months’ contract was up, to let those banns be actually published?

“If any of you know any just cause or impediment why these persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony,” concluded the curate’s voice, “ye are to declare it.”

What in the world was Mr. Waters going to “declare” about it to his family when we reached that point? What just cause or impediment (except the real ones) would he choose to “announce” as the bar to our getting married? Or would he, just as he did this morning at breakfast, leave all explanations to me, and reward me with a grateful look when I’d achieved them?

Well!...

Plenty of time before that happens....

To-night, though, there’d be that other explanation: his to me about that—really, under the circumstances it might be called that outrage! Even yet I hadn’t made up my mind how I was to accept what he should say. The only thing left standing of all the many answers I’d considered and rejected was, “Well, it must never happen again, that’s all!”

Even that doesn’t sound right, somehow.

Perhaps something really clinching will occur to me later.

It was almost at the end of this Day of Rest that the Governor, extra sunburnt and out-of-door-looking from the links, returned to find the women-folk of his household—to which I suppose I must count myself as belonging officially—sitting over that diminuendo of half-cups that marks the end of tea.

“Has your uncle gone, dear?”

“Yes; met some old crony of his and joined him for the journey home. If you tell me where his bag is I’ll get it sent down to the station to meet the six, Mother?”

“I’ll see to it now.”

She went out of the drawing-room—I know with the usual gentle intention of leaving the young people a minute to themselves after having been apart all day; but before Theodora and Blanche could follow her, the Governor, saying that he simply must change and get this dust off, disappeared himself.

He disappeared until supper-time.

For late Sunday supper they don’t dress at The Lawn. So I was still wearing my cream cloth costume with the white French blouse that Mrs. Waters likes when the hour came which is given over to my official fiancÉ and myself. I’m quite hardened to this now.

I supposed he would suggest the den. (I hate that den.) But he didn’t.

“Shall we go for a walk?” he said instead, “round the lawn?”

“Yes.”

“Shall I fetch you a wrap to put over that frock?”

“Oh, no. It’s perfectly warm, thanks.”

“Oh.... Very well.”

And so, at the dusk of the day, just as in the morning sunshine of it, I found myself pacing a garden path by his side, and wishing to goodness he’d get this over, out of the way.

He ought to be made to grovel, of course; that was as it should be.

But the longer he delayed mentioning that grotesque incident, the more it loomed!

It seemed to hang over my head like the shade of the trees that bordered the further edge of the lawn, which we had now reached. The great spread of turf was gleaming greyly in the dew. A bat, attracted by the whiteness of my gown, flickered out of the shade and wheeled above us.

“Well,” began the Governor, “my uncle left all sorts of messages for you.”

He would, of course. Carefully refraining from asking what they were, I said mildly, “Thank you.”

“He’s back in London by now.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose if he’d stayed on much longer,” observed my employer, in a detached tone, “you wouldn’t!”

I said defensively, “I really had been thinking I might find myself obliged to go back to town at once!”

“After arranging to stay here for at least a fortnight,” he concluded quietly; “after having given notice at the office—”

“The office” was good! Just as if “the office” meant anything but himself, Mr. William Waters!

—“and having no people of your own to consider—what should you have said to mine?”

“I should have had to tell them that it was to—to attend a funeral!” I retorted, with a memory of Mrs. Skinner. “Or”—here I checked the suggestion of getting my hair singed and cut. I thought I’d better not begin by mentioning my hair! And I added recklessly—“or that I’d got to go to the dentist’s and have every one of my teeth out!”

“Rather than stay here in these circumstances. I see. Yes. I——Do you know, I have felt uncommonly like that myself,” admitted my employer. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. I thought it over last night, as I told you, and I’ve been thinking about it again to-day.”

I wondered what sort of a game of golf he’d played.

“It can’t go on like this!” he said, suddenly stopping in our stroll and facing me in the deepening dusk under the copper-beech. “I can’t stand it. It’s got a—a bit too thick!” he concluded, quite schoolboyishly.

Then he began again, incoherently, indignantly, as if each word he said were a shell that held showers of bullets of other words.

“Theo’s tomfoolery! Those dashed flowers! My uncle and his—his remarks!”

“I know!” I said fervently. He turned on me again, and added unexpectedly, “And you!”

“M-me?”

“Yes!” explosively. “You’re the worst of all—and you do know it! Because I’ve let you in like, this—”

“They’ll hear you from the house—you really are like Theo sometimes.”

—“Because I’ve let you in,” sinking his voice and speaking once more calmly and deliberately, “for lots of unpleasantnesses which nobody could have—well, which I never anticipated—you do all in your power to pay me back!”

“All that—at dinner last night,” I said virtuously, “was nothing to do with me. You can’t say it was.”

“No, I admit it was Theo.... But it was all part and parcel of the same impossible situation. Impossible! It can’t go on like this.”

“So you said before! But this morning you said you were unable to release me?”

“So I am. Which means that there’s only one other thing to be done about it,” said my employer.

I waited, wondering what on earth this might be.

Utterly unexpected was his next remark:

“Don’t you think you could manage to be—friends with me?”

“Friends?” I repeated incredulously.

Then something of his meaning began to dawn upon me, and it was with a return of Manner B that I added: “I suppose you mean ‘official’ friends?”

“No, I don’t,” he said rather tartly. (That manner never has been lost on him.) “I mean, why can’t we be really friends and call ‘Pax’—for at least the time that you’re here? Don’t you see how much better it would make it if we could face these awkwardnesses together, instead of my knowing every time that you are only waiting for the chance to rub it in and to get at me?”

This was all so foreign to his Near Oriental vocabulary that I nearly laughed. But not quite. For it was being borne in upon me still more clearly that I didn’t care for this suggestion of his at all. He was actually asking for my help and co-operation, not in a sham rÔle, but a real one? Well, I thought, what cheek!

“If you mean,” I said, “that you want me to promise not to ‘rag’—not to—to banter you again about all this; not to go on saying things that mean one thing for you and another to whoever else hears them, and all that——”

I was going to say that this I might promise; although I felt he was asking for a good deal—for his official fiancÉe’s one safety-valve, in fact!

“No, no! That’s not what I mean,” he put in. “When I say ‘friends,’ I mean it. Genuine friends. On the terms we might be on if we weren’t en—if we hadn’t this ‘engagement’ between us.”

“How can we be that?” said I emphatically.

“Why can’t we?” he persisted.

“Why? Because I—I don’t see how I could be expected to answer such a question!”

He didn’t say, “You agreed to the other!” But I knew some men might. So I went on trying to explain to this specially obtuse one.

“Don’t you see how much easier it is to pretend to be engaged or even—in love with a person, than to turn round and like them because you’re asked to?”

“Is it?”

“But of course it is!” said I. “One can act being—engaged and all that. One can’t force oneself into friendship, real liking.” (Stupid, he was; it was just like his not seeing the difference between accepting furs—and a frock!) “One simply can’t make oneself like. That is asking too much. And I never bargained for it. It wasn’t——”

—“In the arrangement,” I nearly said.

I might just as well have said it! For:

“Damn—dash that infernal arrangement!” muttered my employer heatedly, crunching, in the absence of Cariad, the well-kept gravel beneath his heel. “Can’t you forget that, leave that alone for the time being? It would be so much easier——”

“Yes! For you perhaps!” I retorted. “But not easy for me; and it’s impossible for me to feel like being ‘friends’ to order!”

He said nothing for a minute. Then he began again quietly. “You mean you dislike me?”

“I don’t even know you well enough for really liking or disliking,” I argued coldly. “And besides, what have we—you and I—in common, that we should expect to get on well together?”

I knew what a hopeless question that is to answer about almost any two persons!

He said rather helplessly, “Well, but hang it all! What have you in common with——”

Here I felt, suspended between us in the dusk like a Mahomet’s coffin, the name of Sydney Vandeleur!

But the Governor changed his mind about uttering it.

He said:

“For instance, what can you have in common with a man like Montresor? You’re twenty-one. He’s what?—Fifty? Sixty? Yet you can talk—you can——You seem to get on all right with him.”

“Naturally!” I said.

The Governor said nothing.

He put up a hand and leaned against a bough of the copper-beech under which we were standing.

Well! It seemed going to be a long discussion.

I sat down on the garden bench a step or so away, and turned my head to look at the glimmering white trumpets of a tobacco-plant that grew behind the bench. The only form in which tobacco smells anything but poisonous! And there were such beds of it at home ... in the evening it scented all the grounds....

“Major Montresor, as he told you, knew me in my home, knew all my people,” I went on slowly. “He knew all the places I went to before I had to drop out of everything that I cared for and had to slave for my own living in that detestable City of yours.”

“You speak as if I owned the City—as if I were responsible for your having had to work there—for the whole thing! Is that fair? Must you go on making me stand for all that? Supposing it hadn’t been there at all that you first met me, Nancy?”

For the first time the name slipped out from my official fiancÉ quite naturally.

“Don’t you think,” he went on, “that we might have managed to get on moderately well then?”

“How can I tell?” said I. I wanted to keep him on that strictly business footing. This other I didn’t want. I knew it would take something from me, and give me nothing—nothing to stand up for myself with—in its place.

“Try to imagine,” he persisted, “that I’d known you in your home, like that chap—what’s-his-name—”

The name—Vandeleur—flickered between us once more like that bat in the air!

—“like Montresor. Imagine that you’d never been at the Near Oriental—never heard of the place. I’m sure I often wish I hadn’t,” the Governor’s voice came ruefully out of the dusk. “Then, instead of this eternal sparring—”

“My only refuge,” I thought, “and he’s trying to turn me out of it!”

—“there might surely have been something distinctly resembling friendship between us?” he said.

I said obstinately, “Might there? I don’t know.”

He moved. There wasn’t enough light to see his face. Only his collar made a white blur against the branch, and the broad slope of his shoulders showed dark against the sky that had deepened from lilac to purple.

“But I know,” he said quietly, “that you could—that you could be——”

He paused.

“Well?” I said, rather uncomfortably. “I could be what?”

“Rather a little brick to me if you chose,” said the Governor.

I am sure it slipped out without his meaning it to. He would have been ready to go on arguing quite logically about “how much more sensible” et cetera.... How there was “absolutely no valid reason why it shouldn’t” and so forth ... for another hour!

He can’t know how the key of a logical argument will fumble forever at the locked safe-door of a woman’s mind that could just fly open to the cipher spelt “Appreciation.”

—“Rather a little brick.”

So he did think me capable of that?

I was glad of the dark under the copper-beech. For I didn’t want my employer to see that his words had any sort of effect on me. Four words ought not, certainly, to be enough to threaten to bring one’s flag down with a run ... or even to flush one’s cheeks with that sudden warmth—of surprise. I didn’t mean to hesitate——

But there was a moment’s silence before I could think what to say. I was glad he was standing right away from me....

Just at that, he came and sat down beside me on the garden-seat.

“Well?” he said expectantly.

“M-m—very well,” I heard myself say with a little sigh.

“You mean that you will?”—quickly. “That it’s peace between us?”

“Yes—” reluctantly, from me.

“And that, instead of remaining”—I heard him laugh a little—“a mere fiancÉe, you’ll be friends now—real chums?”

“If you like,” I sighed again. “That is promotion, isn’t it?” I said, not meaning to be altogether too polite to him.

“Nancy, I know I’m rotten in lots of ways,” he admitted frankly. “I daresay you think I’ve got a beast of a temper, don’t you?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “you did kick Cariad, didn’t you?”

“Little brute needs it! He’s disgustingly spoilt. Everyone is who belongs to my mother.” ...

“And you did make Theo cry!”

“Did her good!”

“It didn’t in the least! She was just as bad again to-day!”

“Was she, by Jove? Then I shall have to——”

“No, no, she wasn’t. I mean, you are!”

“Ah, but I’m—we’re going to turn over a new leaf!” he said, laughing. “That’s settled, isn’t it? Good! This is going to be no end better, all round.”

All very well for him to say so! I thought, as I got up and turned towards the dim, blue-white front of the house with the dark girdle of the veranda circling it, and the windows, now lighted up, set into it like a chain of long, rosy jewels.

He rose too.

“Well!” he said, straightening himself a head and shoulders above me. “Do we shake hands on that, Nancy?”

“I suppose so,” said I.

What else was there to say or do?

I don’t consider it’s going to be “better all round.” For me it will be ever so much more awkward—as well as something—yes!—something like a climb-down.

Still——

As he held out his hand I put my own into a particularly warm and hearty grip.

It was the very first time we’d shaken hands at all.

Last night a kiss on the hair!

To-night, a handshake!...

And, in spite of all I’d expected, he’d never once mentioned that kiss.

I suppose he won’t now.