_Would_ I? I nearly gasped with relief! Why couldn’t he have seen before what a difference this would make to the situation? There isn’t much dignity in it, goodness knows. But this would save some appearance of it, at all events! I said quietly, “If it is the same to you, I certainly should prefer it.” “Then please wait here while I see them. I won’t keep you a moment,” said Still Waters, and he walked quickly out of the room. It seemed an hour to me, but I suppose the minute-hand of the round-topped clock on the broad marble mantelpiece had only moved on two steps before the door opened again to admit my employer. “That’s all right,” he told me, with his succinct nod. “I have announced the ‘engagement’ to the three other typists, and shall let Mr. Dundonald and Mr. Alexander know before I leave. I won’t keep you, Miss Trant. Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon,” I said. “Thank you.” For the first time in my life I really felt like thanking him. And yet he’d only done the most ordinary thing that one would expect the most ordinary man to take as a matter of course. Only the custom-honoured practice of the Near Oriental is to refuse to regard its head as an ordinary man. Of course, he _isn’t_. There are advantages in making a presupposition of this kind, perfectly clear from the very start! Feeling comparatively at ease and my own mistress again, I entered the typists’ room with my head as high as it had been when I marched out to the lift at lunch-time after Miss Robinson’s voicing of what they all thought of me. Miss Robinson, with her shrewd face startled into the likeness of someone much younger and less astute, broke away from the other two—they had been all three chattering and knotted up together in the corner by the cupboard where the tea-things are kept—and came frankly towards me. “Well, Miss Trant! _Here’s_ some news we’ve just had sprung on us,” said she, speaking as if she found great difficulty in sorting out her words. “I must say—well, really! Gracious! Are you going to shake hands and let us congratulate you, as I suppose is the right thing, or are you feeling wild with me about this morning? We didn’t know, you know. We never dreamed——! How was anyone to guess, after all——!” “Of course you couldn’t,” I said, shaking hands with one after the other. “And of course I’m not feeling ‘wild!’” My revenge was to hand if I wanted it. But somehow I didn’t feel it would be worth it, now. Though, as a matter of fact, the reminder of what I had felt that morning had brought some of it surging back over me again. And this feeling was not improved by the wording of little Miss Holt’s felicitations.