“Because he was too tactful, too nice. He’d too much fine feeling,” she explained eagerly. “He couldn’t possibly ask you so soon after the ‘smash’ in your affairs, and after Colonel Trant’s death, and all. It _would_ have looked too much as if he were taking advantage of that to rush the position. He determined to wait until you—until he—well, to wait,” said Cicely. “He saw I was sympathetic; he didn’t mind telling me all this. But he was going to ask you when he and his mother came back from abroad. All the time, he was simply longing to come and carry you off bodily from that hateful typewriter where he kept thinking of you chained, he said, like Andromeda (who _was_ she, exactly?) to her rock. Only he just wouldn’t. Wasn’t it _sweet_ of him, Tots!” “To wait and tell all this to another girl?” “But it was you he was coming round to tell!” “He didn’t stop to see me.” “He _had_ to get back to Belgrave Square and dress for a theatre-party of his mother’s.” “What he came for at all, after yesterday, I don’t see!” “It was _about_ yesterday he came to see you, Tots! You see, he says he met you, and you seem to have made him understand that you were engaged to be married.” “Well? Didn’t he believe me? Did he come round here and sit here filling the place with that abominable reek of Egyptian cigarettes—and, yes! finishing _all_ that nice peach jelly I got in specially for you—to find out whether it was true?” “Is it true, then?” gasped Cicely. “_Yes!_ I told him so. I told Lady Vandeleur so. I am engaged.” “And not—to _him_!” Cicely seemed utterly unable to grasp how this could be. “What? After all he’s said—and _with_ his photograph on your dressing-table—not that it’s nearly good enough for him! And after what I told him I hoped——” “What DID you tell him?” I groaned resignedly. Cicely twisted the long, slender figure, upon which her equally slender salary as a mannequin depends, into a more comfortable curve against the cushions. “Well! _Poor_ Mr. Vandeleur! When he said he’d seen you lunching at the Carlton alone with a young man, I told him it must be a mistake. You never _did_ lunch there, or with young men. It was just what I admired you for, when it’s _so_ easy to get into the other way of being rather nice to people just for the sake of their giving you a good time and a change from being at work all day! And even though you’re not a bit stuffy with me because I sometimes do it, you——” “Never mind me. What did he say?”