“He said: ‘But how _could_ there be a mistake? She brought up this self-satisfied-looking individual and introduced him to my mother as her _fiancé_. She let us congratulate him!’ I said, ‘Well, but she hasn’t _got_ a _fiancé_—or I should have known about it! I’ve never heard a syllable. She didn’t even tell me she was going out to lunch. She must have been taken out at a moment’s notice—by a friend of Jack Trant’s, perhaps. Or,’ I said, ‘it may have been someone she absolutely had to meet, on business!’” she continued vaguely—much she knows about business!—“‘Getting a better post, or something of that sort. And when she met you unexpectedly, she was flurried, and didn’t know how to explain. Is your mother rather particular, or strait-laced?’ Mr. Vandeleur said, ‘Very, I am afraid!’ So I said, ‘Well, that’s what must have happened!—Tots, in her nervousness, and not wishing your mother to be shocked, just blurted out ‘_fiancé_’——” “Thank you,” I muttered. “I didn’t know _I_ was a blurter-out!” “You mean _I_ am! I daresay! Well, I don’t care! I thought that _must_ have been it—I didn’t see what else it could have been! And the poor man was so thirsting to hear anything I could tell him about you, that I should have been a brute not to!” declared my chum, plaintively defiant. “So I just said everything I could—about that photograph, and all!” “What photograph?” I snapped. “Why, that one of Mr. Vandeleur. I recognized him from that, the moment Mrs. Skinner let him in. And I told him that it was the one and only portrait of a young man that you seemed to possess, and that you always keep it in a silver frame beside your looking-glass. Now, Tots, you can’t say you don’t!” No; I couldn’t. “And that cheered him up so, poor fellow! He said—Oh, _isn’t_ it a tragedy?” interpolated Cicely with zest—“that I’d given him fresh hope to go away with!” “Fresh fiddlesticks,” I muttered, still more savagely. “You mean there isn’t any?” “I mean,” I explained as patiently as I could, “that a girl can’t be engaged to two men at once.” “Then _who’s_ this other, Tots, that you’ve never said a word about? He can’t possibly be fit to hold a candle to—I mean, who _is_ it?” “It is the managing director and head of the firm where I’ve been working,” I told her bluntly. “His name is Mr. William Waters.” “_What?_ Not the man you all call ‘_Still Waters_’? The one you all detest, who’s so impossible to please? Engaged to him? Oh, now you’re pretending! Tell me, Tots. Of course you are only joking, after all?” A nice idea of “joking” my chum has got! “_Does_ this look like a joke?” I demanded suddenly. The newly-bought diamonds flashed under her widely-opened eyes. “Don’t you admire my engagement ring, Cis?”