At the office, which to my experience seemed to belong to a previous existence, but to my eyes seemed only of yesterday, every familiar object was in its place and unchanged. The first of these was the figure of Mr. Dundonald. He confronted us just outside the door of the Principal’s office, and after a bow to me which a week ago would have made me long to shriek with amusement, came forward with his most affairÉ manner and said something, gravely and in a low voice, to his chief.

“I know. Can’t attend to it now. Presently!” the Governor put him aside, but also seriously. “When Mr. Albert Waters comes in; I’ve ’phoned him. Send the boy to me when I ring.”

Then he opened the door of his room.

Here, too, all looked exactly as it had done that afternoon four months and an eternity ago! The light and spaciousness of it, the mile-walk stretch of deep red carpet, the round-topped mahogany clock on the wide mantelshelf, that big desk, bare but for the turnover date ticket upon it, his revolving chair in front of it, and that other plump green-morocco-covered arm-chair that he had first pointed at, that afternoon, for me to take.

He pointed to it now.

“Sit down, please.”

Down I sat, watching him as he turned to the desk. He was writing rapidly telegraph-forms. Then his hand went out to the well-known row of electric bell-pushes on his desk. One thing there, after all, was new: the extending bracket-telephone. Ah, yes; he’d put that in his letter....

The equally well-known sharp little Cockney face of Harold appeared at the door; the boy came up and took the forms, which the Governor had gathered into two bundles.

“These to go off at once. These to be coded.”

“Yessir.”

I sat there wondering. If this business of his meant so much haste, why had he made Mr. Dundonald wait for it? Above all, what had I to do with it that I should be there at all?

We were alone again. He glanced at the clock, then wheeled round in his chair and faced me. He spoke with matter-of-fact politeness.

“Now, Miss Trant! I suppose you want to know what all this is about? Not only my bringing you on here, but about the whole of our past arrangement?”

Did I want to know? After all, what did it matter to me now? For me, all had been summed up in his dropping of my—of his name for me, and in the remembrance of another girl’s laughing face. What stones would he give her to wear? Not diamonds.... I said nothing.

“Shall I tell you,” he began again, “now?”

“Well, I don’t think any explanation was promised when you drew up that contract,” I said wearily. “I don’t really mind ... you needn’t trouble.” ...

“I might wish to clear it up,” he suggested. “Well, suppose we begin with this.”

He handed over to me the newspaper which seemed to have hurled such a bomb at him.

I read the paragraph his finger marked as he passed it to me.

I read it again. I was feeling much too tired and stupid to read newspapers—a lengthy, fruitless and exhausting occupation at any time, I consider.

“I’m afraid,” I said forlornly, passing it back, “that this doesn’t convey very much to me.”

He smiled, I thought as much as to say, “These business-girls!”

Then he said, “Well, but you’ve met this Monsieur Charrier, this big French shipping man, in Anglesey? Perhaps you didn’t realize that I’d business reasons for remaining on cordial terms—keeping in with him at all costs? Anyhow I may tell you now that this was in view of the amalgamation which he and my firm might be forming. I couldn’t, you understand, say anything before, but there was to be an alliance——”

“Yes?” (Between himself and that Charrier girl. Why go on explaining it all to me? I didn’t want to hear all this.) But he went on more quickly:

“You saw the sort of man he was. Touchy, excitable, easily put off! I had to be always on my guard with him. So that when I heard that he—this important person to me, Miss Trant—seemed inclined to do me the honour of selecting me, not only as a business-ally, but also—”

He paused and looked at me. Of course I was attending, if that was what he meant!

—“also as a possible son-in-law, what was I to do?”

I said nothing. Of course he could do nothing but accept such a bride with enthusiasm; but why apologize to me?

“I realized,” he went on, “that I might offend him to the verge of breaking off the other deal. I explained to you at our first interview here that I’d had no intention of getting married?”

(Had. Then he’d fallen in love with her later.)

“Last Easter, which we spent at Dinard with the Charriers,” he went on, “I—we all were on the most friendly terms with Mademoiselle Charrier—”

I clenched my hands together; they were feeling, on that August afternoon, cold as ice.

—“And she was soon quite confidential to me,” continued the Governor. “Told me lots of things about herself, just like a child—”

(A minx! That assumed frankness!)

—“told me, even, of her own understanding with a young airman who was over there then. A secret from her people—you know what these French parents are—but I don’t suppose it’s a secret any longer now this is all up.”

(Ah, no! Odette Charrier wouldn’t find it hard to jilt an airman or an archangel—for him!)

“It was she herself who told me, perfectly candidly, of her father’s idea of the offer of her hand to me. You know that rum French way they have—pretty awkward, that,” went on the Governor, beginning to speak almost as rapidly as for that dictation he used to gabble off to me. “I was in a tight corner then! There was the risk of turning a possible friend—and such a powerful one!—into a certain enemy. I knew how offended he’d be by a refusal that might seem due to reluctance! Then there was the young lady to consider—What’s the matter, don’t you follow me?”

“No—I don’t understand,” I made myself say quite coherently, “what you mean by ‘refusal.’”

“Well, she didn’t want to marry me! She’d got this aviator-chap. I didn’t want to marry anybody—then.”

(Then. Was he going to inflict upon me the whole of their love-story?)

“And I could only forestall the proposal she told me he meant to make by showing her father some really tangible proof that I was out of the question. You see?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I was—a nominal fiancÉe was to be the tangible proof.”

“Exactly. Well! Now comes the news that does away with that necessity. I’d been expecting the corroboration of it for some days. However, it’s out at last; here.” He tapped the paper. “It means that the alliance Waters-Charrier has been knocked on the head; it means that my firm isn’t going to be quite the almighty concern I hoped it might; but it also means that something—a big thing!—is saved out of the fire: namely, that I needn’t take these drastic measures to avoid Monsieur Charrier’s displeasure. If I don’t want to marry into his family, I can say so if I choose.”

(If—! He meant that now Odette and he could show that theirs was nothing but a love-match!)

“And if I hadn’t broken off our nominal engagement this morning, Miss Trant, I should be able to do it this afternoon; now.”

This meant that he was positively eager to get rid of me. Knife-thrust as it was, I was glad to feel it. It spurred me for what I had to do, this time without even being allowed to pick my minute; to rise, smile conventionally, hold out my hand in farewell.

He took it lightly, dropping it almost at once. In a tone of unmistakable, undisguised relief he added, “So that’s the end of that.”

“Yes!” I returned, quite casually enough to deceive a man, though it took my last ounce of effort. “Good-bye!”

“Wait a minute. I said ‘the end of that,’” took up my late employer. “Now here’s something that begins. Will you sit down again, please?”

The influence of the place we were in, I suppose, made me obey him. Again I sat back in the green-leather chair, wondering if it made it better or worse to have this leave-taking so dragged out, wondering why he chose this form of torture.

He came and stood above me. He began, quite gently, “I’ve taken your word that that about Vandeleur was an accident, not an appointment. Well, then! If it wasn’t on his account that you had that wire sent to recall you, if it wasn’t because of him you bolted like that from me—from Anglesey,” he spoke more emphatically, “Why was it?”

Again this cross-examination? What was I to say? I looked desperately about the big room and its handsome fittings, at the side-table where I used to sit with my notes.

“Why?” he insisted.

“Oh!” I cried angrily. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it does. Why did you run away?”

I shook my head. He couldn’t make me say....

“Why?” he repeated mercilessly. “Was it because of what occurred the morning before that tussle of ours with the Bay, that time you were so reluctantly compelled to save my life?”

“Oh, yes! if you must bring that up again!” I threw at him, struggling to call back the helpful, self-respecting anger which I’d been able to feel quite easily then. “It’s all done with now, so——”

“So it was because I kissed you.”

“Well?”

He stood looking at me. I couldn’t look at him, but I held my head up and stared hard at a distant pale-green wall.

“Are you—are you surprised at that? Any girl,” I forced myself to say, “would have been furious.”

“You mean,” quickly, “that any girl is furious when she’s kissed.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not thinking of other girls!”

“Any girl I kissed, then?”

“No”—the Charrier girl’s face flashed before me, and a bitter little laugh escaped me as I spoke—“oh, no.”

“You mean only yourself, then?”

“I suppose so, but——”

“You objected, strenuously enough. Why?”

“‘Why?’—”

“Was it”—he was cross-examining me again—“because it was I who kissed you, or,” he paused, “because it was a merely official lover who did so?”

I was caught; there was no direct answer I could make.

“I hated it!” I cried defensively.

He varied the form, not the question.

“It, or the circumstances?”

“Oh! Anything you like.”

“But which?” he persisted. “There’s a world of difference between the two. If you please, Miss Trant—”

(How dared he use that authoritative tone for which I detested and adored him so!)

—“I want to know which it was?”

“Do you think I would stay”—I tried to fence—“after being treated like that? It was”—I groped for a strong enough word—“infamous of you, Mr. Waters!”

“Of me?” he said. “It would have been equally so of any man?”

“Far worse of you!” I blurted out before I could recall it.

“Why? Because I’d no right?—But nor has any other man, apparently?” he added questioningly.

“Oh, none.”

“Then,” he said, and it sounded almost triumphant, “am I so specially hateful to you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?” he caught up.

“No! Oh—” I felt myself shaking all over as I tried to wriggle out of this corner into which he’d got me. What was he doing? Had he guessed? Guessed that I cared? Then why drive it home?... It was worse than cruelty ... it was—“anything you like, if you must go on like this. Only—please—please don’t ask—anything.” And I stopped on the sob that I could only just keep back.

“Ah,” he said slowly. Still I couldn’t look at him, but I heard a change in his voice as he added, “Very well; what excuse do you expect me to offer?”

“Excuse?” I flamed. I was too afraid I should break down in earnest and disgrace myself. “There is no excuse you can possibly make.”

“Isn’t there? There might be more than one, I think,” he said, quite gently still. “I might put forward, for instance, that I’m only an ordinary man, subject to temptation, and that you—if you’ll allow me to say so, Miss Trant—are a very lovely girl.”

“Ah, no! Don’t!” I cried out, stung. “Not that sort of thing.”

“Quite right,” he broke in promptly, but still quietly. A second’s pause, then—

“There would be no excuse for snatching at you like that, Nancy, if there weren’t a reason. And the reason, if you really haven’t guessed it, is, as it happens——”

Once before, that day, three words from him had made a series of situations crumble away and become as though they’d never been. Once again a whole set of relations—that between a typist and the head of the firm; that between a paid official fiancÉe and her employer; that between a man and a girl who played that drawn game of platonic friendship; that other between two who quarrelled and fenced and misunderstood and hurt each other and themselves so cruelly—was brushed aside by another three words.

Billy Waters, still standing there and looking down gravely at me, said very simply, “I love you.”

What could I say? I was too dazed. I gasped, as when at Porth Cariad I waded out for a swim, and a racing wave met me and dashed above my breast, catching my breath. Sentences formed themselves and died away before I opened my lips.

“You can’t mean——” “Then why——” “A mistake——” “This is the first gleam I’ve had that you——” “If it’s because you’re sorry——” Then, of them all, I could catch firmly at only one thought. I said breathlessly, holding the arm of the chair, “But that girl——”

“Won’t you understand? I never gave her a thought of that sort, or she me,” he declared rapidly, “except about how we were to get out of it. If you only knew, that unfortunate French child and I had as much ado to keep from getting married as some couples have to pull it off! I tell you she and that young Lenoir—man who’s just beaten the record for upside-down flying—were—but it’s not their affair I’m bothering about just now—it’s——”

“But she was so pretty!—so much smarter—she——”

“She was quicker than you! She spotted, that day at tea in the cottage, how her plan for me of an official fiancÉe was working out.”

“Her plan?” Even in that moment I remembered that the idea had never seemed quite like him!

“Yes—I was at my wit’s end. She told me the only plan was to say I was already booked! Yes! But who to? ‘Anyone,’ she said. ‘You engage someone—like a courier, an interpreter—someone you pay to understand it is a farce’—(You know the way she talks!) ‘You go to an office—your own, perhaps. You choose one of your stenographistes—you have of them, yes?’ I told her I’d got four. I think I said three of the lot would be more or less impossible as a fiancÉe, but the fourth—But never mind that.”

“Yes, but I do! What did you say about the fourth?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said, laughing a little, “some time. We have plenty of time, I hope.”

“No, now,” I said. It was my turn to insist. “What about the fourth?”

“Oh, I forget! Well, then,” hurriedly. “I believe I said she seemed quite a nice, quiet, unassuming little mouse of a person—look here, you’ll have to forgive me if I do tell you!—not particularly brilliant at her job, but dependable; and that perhaps she was the kind of girl one could take about when it seemed necessary, and leave a good deal to one’s people—mind, I’d scarcely seen you! I hadn’t seen you! I said I thought you seemed——”

“Well?”

“Well, perfectly tractable!”

He broke off to laugh again, and moved nearer to me.

“A fortnight after that, Nancy, you were defying me in my own den! That frock, and—chucking my ring about the piano! And now ...” he said, with a hand in his jacket-pocket, “now, Miss Trant, I’m going to put that ring back, if I may, in its proper place.”

He would have taken my hand, but all in my flurry of delight I put them both behind me.

“No! Wait! Your people—what will they say to—all this?”

“But ... bless me! they know we’re engaged!”

“Yes, that way,” I said shakily. “But this?”

“D’you suppose, Nancy-Monica Trant, that they’re ever going to know that there’s any difference? D’you think ‘Theo will notice’ any? I doubt if they’d believe that yarn if we told them! Very soon we shan’t believe it ourselves! So——Wait? I’ve waited too long!”

But I was, all of a sudden, shy of him as I’d never been in my trembling typist days. I put him back with a look.

“How long?” I asked falteringly. “Can’t you tell me when?”

His face was full of protest, but he leaned, half-sitting, against the edge of his desk.

“What can I tell you?” he said. “That it was just now in Battersea Park, seeing that the girl one can’t stop squabbling with is the girl one has to make love to——”

“Yes, but really——”

“Or that it was mere gratitude to you for dragging me out of the water? Or—as soon as I saw how disappointed my people would be if I ever let you go. (My mother, last night! In tears—declaring it must be all my temper!) Or that—well, that as soon as I got you down to my home I began to wonder what on earth I was thinking of, not to see that I kept you there.”

“No, but really——”

“Hang it all, Nancy, after all these weeks and months!” he cried, gaily impatient, throwing back his handsome fair head. Could I ever have thought he wasn’t handsome? He strode up to me, sat sideways on the green-leather arm of my chair, put his hand in front of me on the other arm, and so faced me. It brought his eyes, gay with laughter and delight, nearer than they had ever been, except once, to my face.

And I felt those eyes of his flash swiftly, from the ripple of hair over my ear to the hot scarlet wave that I knew was dyeing my cheek, then to my mouth. And it was as though I had felt his lips first here, then there, and then there again, even before he drew closer yet and kissed me as though he could not stop.

But I pulled away. “Oh, Billy! No! Please!” I heard myself sob. “I can’t bear it. Not—not all at once. Not so much——”

“Little miser!” he muttered, and took my hands down to clasp behind his neck. “Am I never to be allowed anything——”

“But I thought——”

“How could you?” he whispered. “Haven’t you eyes?... Dashing away from me like that, before I could get in a word! You spitfire! ‘Don’t speak to me,’ at every turn! And that first time, I was only given a scrap of your hair to kiss!”

“S-sorry you don’t like my hair——”

“Not like it?” He pressed his cheek to it. “Not all that lovely soft stuff that I always wanted to touch?—and mightn’t—not even that time after it came loose in the water—”

“Looking horrid!”

—“and clung all down you! D’you know what I shall do to it, presently?”

I didn’t speak; I shut my eyes against his shoulder, and sighed.... And I had once thought I was not the “falling-in-love-type” of girl! I had once called him “that frozen ogre!”

“I shall twist this hair of yours into a great rope of black silk,” he said, “and haul you off by it to that cave! Only question is, how soon? Nancy! How soon?”

“A cave?” I said, half hearing, with my mouth against the cloth of his sleeve, “what d’you mean?”

“Why, the sort of cave with a rose-garden to it, and perhaps a little white wicket-gate at the top of the stairs—don’t you remember?”

But we’d certainly forgotten the author of that long-ago contretemps at the breakfast-table of The Lawn, the elderly enfant terrible of that age-old week-end! Our heads were close together over the date-ticket that the head of the firm had grabbed from his desk to reckon up “how soon it could possibly be,” my finger with the ring on it was caught between his lips, when the briefest of taps at the door was followed by the most sudden of entrances—by Uncle Albert Waters.

“Ah!” he began, “what’s to be done now?” His rosy, John Bull face was unrecognizably worried, but it suddenly lighted up. “What, the little girl too?”

I had sprung away—I hope!—before he could have noticed that there, in that most official-looking of offices, I had been sitting on his nephew’s knee; but I was still so fluttered that I could think of nothing to do but offer the old gentleman my cheek! At all events, he was absurdly pleased.

“Nancy, my dear!... But what brought you back to London?”

“Furnishing,” said Billy, without a quiver.

“Glad to hear it, my boy! First bit of good news to-day,” said Mr. Waters, turning grave again. “I say, Billy! About this——”

“I’m going,” I said quickly, picking my hat up from the side-table where it had been tossed down as upon a gorse-bush. “I only meant to stay a minute.”

“Nancy—I say!” came resentfully from the desk.

“I’ll be in the waiting-room, then,” I promised. “Or, if I may, I’ll go and look up Miss Robinson and the girls while you talk over your business.”

I don’t know why, exactly. Only I felt I must see those three girls again with this new look on my face. They might not know the difference! Still—I walked to the door.

“Sensible little woman, this of yours, William,” his uncle trumpeted approvingly, holding it open for me. “Knows there’s a time for everything.... All to yourself for good, presently; that’s been official for months now. Don’t you glower at me, lad, I saw you——”

The door shut behind me. But through it I heard Uncle Albert’s robustious: “Why! Bless my life! Anyone would think I’d interrupted you before you’d been engaged five minutes!”