But as I sat beside him on the comfortably padded seat with a lovely rug drawn up over my knees, and with a thick glass screen keeping my _chic_ little new hat from getting blown about, I felt the pad-and-pencil side of my life slipping away from me as swiftly and steadily as the green hawthorn hedges that lined the road seemed slipping past this gliding car. I had had a brute of a time just lately—now came the reaction. I suppose it was partly the entirely feminine sensation, thrilling every scrap of my body, that it was once more decently dressed! Partly, too, it was the influence of skimming over a country road again, breathing in untainted breezes under a blue sky with rolling white cauliflower clouds; having a whole smiling landscape to myself again!—for the moment I lost count of _how_ this had happened. The thoughts of the last hour were left behind with those of the last two years—with the mean streets and the City smells and noises, and those Battersea rooms, and that utter lack of space and privacy, and that crushing sense of being just one unit out of millions that didn’t matter! Before I’d experienced these things, I’d lived for nineteen years, another sort of life; and this seemed almost like coming home to it. I felt as if I were the fish that, having been left stranded on the proverbial gravel path, has somehow succeeded in flopping back to his native element. I gave myself up to the luxury of the feeling—to the exhilarating rush through the clear air. And I’d practically forgotten who was driving me, when his business-like voice sounded once more in my ear. “Miss Trant! Your Christian name, as I saw by your note to my mother, is Monica?” “Yes.” I supposed he was now going to ask me if I had any objection to his addressing me thus as long as I was his mother’s guest. Why, of course, he’d _have_ to! Just as I should have to bring myself to use his own name of “William.” (“_Ahem!_ _Wil_-liam!” as Miss Robinson pronounced it pompously.) How queer to have to be asked to accord one’s Christian name under such terms! Really, he might have taken it as a matter of course that he must, for the next fortnight or so, call me “Monica.” Therefore I was rather taken aback by his next remark. “I shall have to ask you if you would mind very much, while you are staying at The Lawn, being called ‘_Nancy_’?” “Nancy!” I echoed, opening my eyes. “Oh, yes—no—I mean—anything you like; but why _Nancy_?” Mr. Waters turned to me for a moment as the car sped smoothly down a level, empty stretch of the white highway. “I’d better explain to you ‘why Nancy,’” he said dryly. In those keen grey eyes of his, where some time before I had suspected a gleam of humour, I now saw a quite unmistakable twinkle of fun! There was even a twitch at the corner of those tightly-fitted lips. But he went on still more dryly. “When I informed my mother that I was engaged to be married to a lady in the office, she had a good many questions to put.”