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.