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“And when do you think the ‘engagement’ had better be announced? At once?”

This was what the Governor said to me this morning when I again presented myself at his desk; this time with the timid “acceptance” which, after poor Jack’s desperate appeal, is my only alternative.

“At once?” I gasped. “Oh, but—How could it? The—well—people would think it so”—I checked a hysterical laugh—“so funny!”

“Funny? What’s funny about it?” took up the Governor, as sharply as if he didn’t see anything at all odd in the whole situation. But he does. He must! What a hateful trick men have of pretending they’re not pretending—when you’re unable to prove, in so many words, that they are! People talk about women being more complicated; good gracious! It’s we who are simple and straightforward. What was I to make of the Governor, when he asked me, in quite an annoyed tone of voice, “I suppose men at the heads of offices have become engaged to their employees before now Miss Trant?”

“Y-yes—of course—Become engaged.”—He was talking now as if this were that!—“But not if——”

“Not if what?”

“Well, not if they have never seen them to speak to!” I explained falteringly. “You see, Mr. Waters, the three other typists in my room——”

“Oh! Those girls!” said Mr. Waters casually, and I caught my breath.

For in the tone of those two words from the Head of Affairs I heard the rest of his meaning—“If they think it odd—if they make difficulties, they can go, at once.”

I saw that nightmare threat of “the sack” looming again, this time over the heads of three girls who had worked with and always been very decent to me. They—if they stood the least bit in this young office tyrant’s way—could go!

“It’s not only the girls,” I urged, clenching my hands to keep them from shaking, and hating the man who made me so nervous. “It’s—everybody. Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander, they must all know that you scarcely exchanged a word with me until you sent for me yesterday, when we—they all thought you were going to dismiss me——”

“Ah?” said the Governor coolly.

“—S-so I can’t tell them, right on the top of that, that we are actually engaged to be married! There’ll have to be—some—some other sort of warning!”

“Don’t see the necessity myself,” said Still Waters, fixing those keen grey eyes upon me as if I were a letter-file or a paper-weight, or some other inanimate object that they’d happened to fall upon while he was meditating on other things. I wondered if he were thinking that, sooner than be bothered over this affair, he would sack Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander and his whole staff! “Still, if you prefer it. You mean that there had better be some intermediate stages; that I ought to begin by singling you out from the others, seeing more of you, and so on. Quite so.”

It was uncanny, the cut-and-dried way in which he spoke of proceedings which—well, are always looked upon as so intensely the opposite of cut-and-dried! This affair was the imitation of something very different; still, one hardly expected him to be able to map it all out, like the diagrams in scientific dressmaking!

“Now, how am I supposed to ‘see more’ of you?” he went on, in the same tone as he might have asked, “Where must I join this dotted line to section D?”

“Ah, I have it.” (The sections were beginning to fit in neatly.) “You will come into my room here each afternoon in Mr. Alexander’s place, and take down my letters.”

“Very well,” I agreed, relapsing into my usual outward meekness and inward rebelliousness.

What a fearful nuisance, to be banished to the Siberia of the Governor’s private room, after the murky but cheery atmosphere of the typists’ “glory-hole,” and the society of three other girls!

A couple of years ago I should have used the shibboleth of my set at home to describe these same girls—“Terrible!—Impossible!” I should have noticed nothing about them beyond their cheap “stock” clothes and the Cockney accents that used to be such an hourly jar to my nerves. I shouldn’t have differentiated the sentimental “Smithie” from Miss Robinson, who has more capacity in her carbon-stained little finger than most of the girls who were with me at Wycombe Abbey had in their heads. I should scarcely have considered them of the same race of being as myself, and as for being on friendly, talkative terms with them—Well, having to fend for oneself in the labour-market does knock a good deal of the nonsense out of one. Here I was, quite annoyed at the prospect of giving up the companionship of the three for the afternoons!

Still, it would be worth it. My employer would be as good as his word about the five hundred pounds. He’d open an account for me. And at lunch-time I shall be able to cable that much-needed hundred to Cape Town.

I’m to begin earning it as private clerk—to a living tape-machine!

“Yes. That will be quite the best plan,” he went on. “That will pave the way for it.” His tone became if anything more “scientifically diagrammatic” still as he said, “To-day is May fourteen; let me see—How long do you suppose it would take before it would be considered the natural thing for me to fall in love with you?”

“‘Natural’? How could it ever be considered natural” was on the tip of my tongue, “for you to fall in love with anybody?—You, who think it ought to be mapped out into a certain number of days, like that sum about ‘twenty reapers reaping so many acres in a week.’”

Primly I answered aloud, “I should think you could please yourself, Mr. Waters.”

“Well, we will see about that presently,” said my employer, turning to the desk. “And now there is this——” After speaking about “the time it took to fall in love,” I thought he’d reached his limit. But no. He went further.

From a drawer that he unlocked he took out a paper that he handed to me.

“I have taken the precaution of having our whole arrangement put down in black-and-white, if you will kindly sign it here.”

—“In black-and-white!”—“sign——!”

I felt the angry colour surging up into my face; I was all the more furious because I dare not show the real rage I was in.

“Oh, yes. I’ll sign it,” I said, with desperate meekness, “if you really think it’s necessary. If you imagine that I am the kind of girl who might take advantage of our—our contract afterwards, sue you for breach of promise, or——”

“Come, come!” Still Waters interrupted briskly, peremptorily. “It’s just because I didn’t think you were ‘that kind of girl,’ amongst other reasons, that I selected you for my post. This instrument is drawn up largely on your own account. You have a pen——?”

I took it out of the case fastened to the front of my very utilitarian blue delaine blouse. I hate wearing it there. I always look upon it as the sign of servitude and the mark of the beast, but it’s the custom—and business-like.

“Right. Now, Miss Trant, I think that’s all for this morning. You can arrange to come in and take down my letters each afternoon at a quarter to three, beginning to-morrow.”

“Yes,” I said, in my meekest tone.

Loud were the murmurs of commiseration that broke from my three friends in my own room when they heard of this novel arrangement.

“What, my dear? You to take down his old letters? That’s the Governor’s idea of giving you one more chance, I suppose,” sniffed Miss Robinson, “before he sacks you! Pity he didn’t tell you to go, and get it over yesterday!”

“He’s simply impossible to please. Why, when I come here first,” said Miss Holt, “he had had three girls at it in one week and they all came out in tears because the Machine had snapped their heads off. For one thing, he dictates at such a rate that I don’t know how he expects anyone to follow him without they have to ask him to repeat it, and then he glowers at you like a Gordian! See if he doesn’t!”

“It’ll be ‘Now, Miss Trant!’” mimicked Miss Robinson, gabbling at top-speed. “‘Got that? Go on—

“‘We can offer no further explanation of same beyond facts already supplied, and are of opinion that there is nothing to be gained by prolonging this correspondence.’ Certainly nothing to be gained by you, my poor dear!”

“No, he’ll be sending for that stolid Scotch Sandy back before the afternoon’s over!”

“Don’t discourage the girl too much before she starts. Still, I wish you weren’t forsaking our room for the afternoons, Miss Trant. We shall miss your merry prattle and your footstep on the stair.”

“Yes, and there won’t be much prattling for you in there,” said Miss Smith. “More like sitting among the mummies and sphinxes and things in the British Museum. Girls, can you imagine Still Waters ‘prattling’ to anybody, even as a little boy?”

“That man was never anything so human as a little boy,” declared Miss Robinson. “He was created grown-up and ready-made and put together like a Remington. Probably in the very act of clicking out—

“‘Contract B.954. Our buyers advise us as under,’ and so on.

“I wouldn’t mind what I betted that he never cried over going to school for the first time, or began to fancy himself more when he’d sat out at a dance and flirted——”

“Flirted! The Governor!” I put in—quite forgetting What would presumably be my cue very soon, and laughing with the others.

“You might just as well think of him falling really desperately in love with——”

“Talk-ing, ladies,” broke in the usual voice, followed by the usual lull.

But the usual twinge of fear didn’t visit me this time.

Let Mr. Dundonald report me; let him complain of me, bitterly, to the Governor if he likes! All Caledonia, stern and wild, can’t get me turned out of the Near Oriental now. To-morrow sees me unshakably installed as—the Governor’s private clerk!

I must say Mr. Waters is even more paralysingly alarming to work for in this capacity.

His dictation—Well! Miss Robinson described it. He simply doesn’t realize, doesn’t mean to realize, that “a clerk” is composed of anything more than a pad and a scurrying pencil. He literally does not see that these objects may be trembling in the grasp of the anxious slip of a young woman, who has to guide them! He’s excruciatingly particular about the transcribing of his sheaf of letters. And I shudder—that is, I should have shuddered only last week—to think what would happen to Miss Trant, typist, if she brought in anything to be signed one second after four-thirty, which is his time for leaving.

But now I’m secure in the knowledge that however much that machine of a young man with the closed cash-box of a mouth may long to sack me as a typist, my other, more lucrative, post could not be so easily filled.

Hurray!

To-day is Friday: that Day of Terror in the office, the day of the outward mails. But it’s brought no terror to me. My week’s salary, if you please, has amounted to eleven pounds, five shillings.

Twenty-five shillings of that was paid out to me in the usual way by Mr. Wallis, our cashier—little dreaming that my purse was already bulging with ten more than welcome sovereigns that I got in exchange for my own cheque (The grandeur of that!) at the Bank where that providential five hundred pounds (four hundred since) has been put down to the account of “Miss M. Trant.”

I daren’t allow myself to think what would have happened if it hadn’t been for that.

As it is, I am able to take home quite a lot of invalid dainties to Cicely (left to the tender mercies of Mrs. Skinner) as well as a lovely lemon-coloured azalea in a pot, and a brand-new novel (four-and-six—half her share of the house-keeping money!).

Spending this fortune will come fatally easily to me, I know. But I’ve a dim presentiment that the earning of it isn’t going to be as easy as that!

This morning, which now seems about a year since I began my “supplementary duties,” Harold summoned me to appear at twelve o’clock, instead of after lunch, before the Governor.

First of all I was seized with nervous flurry, wondering what on earth I’d done. Then I remembered that it wouldn’t really matter about that. What mattered was what I should have to do next?

There was another cut-and-dried plan for this in the very tone of the Governor’s “Good morning” when he glanced up to see me standing submissively beside his desk again.

“Now, Miss Trant, you have been working in here exactly a fortnight,” he reminded me.

“Exactly a fortnight.” I wonder if he is going to keep count of every one of the three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of the year which must elapse before I shall be able to say a gleeful good-bye to him and his diagrammatic “engagement?” I expect so: I expect there’s a time-table for each one, drawn up and carefully put away for reference in one of the locked drawers of his big cleared desk.

“I think that something more might be done at once about this arrangement of ours.”

“Oh, yes?”

(A fortnight! Neither too long nor too short a time, he probably considered, for some “fresh development” to take place.)

“So what about my taking you out to lunch to-day?”

What about it? A vivid mental picture of the expression on the faces of Miss Robinson, Miss Holt and Smithie rose before me. What—what would they look like when——Well! They’ve got to look it sooner or later, so it might as well begin to-day.

“Certainly,” I nearly said. Then I hesitated. No! Why should he be able to “fit in” every single detail of his plans, with the ease of a born jig-saw genius? Why shouldn’t he have to make some rearrangement, consult someone else’s convenience for once in his life? I would just try to put my tiny little spoke in his wheel here, to see.

“Mr. Waters, would you mind making it to-morrow instead?”

“Much the same to me,” returned my employer rather unexpectedly—still, I suppose he would allow a twenty-four hours’ margin in these arrangements, in case of accidents. “But why wait?”

“Oh, because”—No woman ever does anything for one unadulterated motive; a thing men won’t understand! So I had my second choice of reasons quite ready, and it was quite naturally, as well as truthfully (for I was thinking of Smithie’s preparations for an outing), that I suggested—“it would seem more ‘natural’ if I were to have on a new—my best hat to go out to lunch in instead of the little old cap I put on because of this drizzle to-day.”

“Ah! Very well,” said Mr. Waters, with his succinct nod. He added, “I suppose that sort of thing is what they mean when they say—when women say—that women have a much better eye to detail in business than men have?”

(I don’t quite know how he meant that. But never mind, Mr. Cut-and-Dried. I have altered your time-table by a day, at least!)

“To-morrow, then,” said Mr. Waters, after I had said “Is that all?” And I went.

The next day was a regular “new-hat” day. Just the sort of day to go out to lunch with a “hovering” fiancé—a real one!—I thought, as I set off down the Embankment, leaving Cicely, whose foot isn’t quite right even yet, at the open sitting-room window with a novel.

It was brightly sunny, but, although we’re nearly in June now, there was a nip of cold in the breeze; the smile of a flirt—of a “cold coquette,” as Major Montresor described me once. I wonder what he’d think if ever he met me again? Probably that it was just like little Monica to “pull off” making a good match with another froggy-natured person.

I laughed at this as I was walking along to the corner where I get the motor-bus. After all, there’s nothing to do but laugh at it—at the whole affair. Actually, it was a momentous choice to have thrust upon any girl; and it might have cruelly embarrassing side-issues. But what’s the good of dwelling on momentous and cruel aspects of subjects that have a comic side to them? The only way is to look hard at that comic side—to see the joke, the whole joke, and, most important of all, nothing but the joke.

I felt satisfactorily strung up to the coming “fun” of the situation when I got into the typists’ dressing-room at the Near Oriental.

Here I found Miss Holt listening to Miss Smith, evidently a little headachy and nervous, attempting to “stand up” to Miss Robinson in some argument.

“The matter with you,” she was saying pettishly, “is that you’re setting up to be a man-hater!”

“Setting up? No such luck,” said Miss Robinson, maddeningly good-tempered. “If I could ever see a fellow I didn’t think was awful, I’d begin thinking of setting up. But where are all the men, good gracious? What does a girl ever see, working in holes of offices? Weeds! Indoor weeds, smelling of stale Virginians and wearing Number Thirteen collars.”

“Collars aren’t anything!” Miss Smith flushed an angry pink.

“No; but what they go round are. And I must say I like to see a chap with a good, thick, strong-looking one (that’s why all the nice girls love a sailor, Smithie) with plenty of sunburn and no spots on it, and—Hul-lo, Miss Trant!”

I had turned up at the right moment to prevent a squabble—I and my brand-new hat bought out of Chérisette’s window, no less! and provided by the princely salary.

“I say, Miss Trant, my child, you’re blossoming out!” commented Miss Holt, all eyes and envy. “How much did that roof cost you? It’s a good one.”

“It is rather a good one,” I admitted quietly. “I’m so glad you like it.”

But I said no more until the morning’s work was over and we had trooped back into the dressing-room to get ready for going out at one o’clock. Then:

“I can’t come to lunch to-day,” I said, drawing on the deliciously “fresh”-feeling white gloves I’d bought for myself at the same time as the hat, and giving a glance round the dressing-room to make sure that they all took in the next announcement. “I’m going out.”

“Who with?” seemed to burst, of its own accord, from three pairs of lips at once.

Drawing myself up to what there is of my full height, I smothered an inclination to giggle foolishly, and answered with starchy dignity, “Since you must know, I’m going out to lunch with Still Waters.”

“Oh, my dear, give that old joke a rest,” urged the most frequent user of “the old joke,” Miss Smith, flushing anew with interest, “and tell us who HE is! This is something quite new, Miss Trant, isn’t it? Doesn’t she look conscious, girls? Didn’t I know that hat meant something? How exciting! I’m so glad, dear; but, do tell us! Not his name, of course——”

For in the code of these girls, it’s not fair to ask for names.

“—but just his Christian name!”

“William,” I admitted, smiling as “coyly” as I could.

“William! Sounds a bit—stand-offish,” objected Miss Holt. “D’you call him ‘Billy,’ by any chance?”

“Never,” I said solemnly, “not by any chance.”

“Of course not. ‘Billy’s’ no class,” said Miss Robinson. “‘William? Ahem! William!’” in a pompous bass voice. “Dark or fair, Miss Trant?”

“Fair.”

“M’m. Well, I suppose Miss Trant would pick a fair one, her being such a reel brunette,” commented Miss Holt, “but as for me, I never could take to a fair man. Puts me in mind of weak tea. About as fair ’s the Governor, Miss Trant?”

“Ye-es; just about.”

“Anything for a bit of a change,” said Miss Robinson satirically. “I should have thought you’d have liked another colour to sit opposite to at lunch, after having to have the same sort of thing staring you in the face all the afternoon. However!—no accounting for ’em!... I hope he’s tall, though?”

“Over six foot, I should think.”

“Ah! Well grown, William! Is the young gentleman in the City, may I ask?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Isn’t she a good sort, answering all our impertinent questions like this! One more, Miss Trant, and we won’t bother you. Where are you going to meet him?”

I don’t think she expected that I would answer this. But I said quite frankly, “I am to meet him just outside the front entrance in Leadenhall Street.” And I whisked out of the room to the lift. I didn’t tell the girls “Look out of that window on the other side of the landing and you’ll see him.”

I knew it wasn’t necessary.

In two minutes’ time I was being helped into a taxi by the august hand of our Governor himself.

I lifted my head and looked straight up at the landing window. Yes, there they were, all three of them, flattening their noses against the pane. I nodded and smiled with bravado. My three colleagues were too utterly taken by surprise to even smile back at me. The expression on their three faces was even more pronounced than as I had foreseen it. Miss Holt was standing in front, and as we drove away I saw her eyebrows rise to her netted hair, while her mouth dropped open.

I could almost hear the gasp that came from it, of:

“Girls! Did you ever? She really is!—with Still Waters! Well! What ever next?”