That dinner-jacket does make the Governor look so much younger—it’s positively laughable! For another thing, it seems to take him right out of his isolated Near Oriental niche, and to put him in the same rank of human beings as men who used to dine at our house when my father was alive. Positively, I have begun to look upon my once-dreaded employer as quite an ordinary—though certainly _not_ a likable—sort of young man! Never again need _he_ expect to keep up, with me, the attitude of a metallic species of Business-deity who disappears after business-hours to some vague, chilly and unknown Olympus, of which no glimpse would ever be vouchsafed to any of us, his grovelling subordinates. Oh, no! Not now that I’ve seen his people, the pretty things out of which his mother has made such a nest of a home for him; not after making the acquaintance of Blanche and of that gift of God, Theodora, and of Cariad. That little outdoor dog spent the whole of dinner-time cosily curled up under the table on his “Missis’s” black satin skirt, and not all the flappings of the Governor’s table-napkin or his curtest “Here! Out of that, Cariad! Outside, sir!” had the slightest effect in dislodging him. I would have given at least five of my as yet unearned five hundred pounds for Miss Robinson to have been granted the sight of Still Waters cheerfully defied by that small Sealyham! I can see her “potting” the scene, with Miss Holt’s white feather neck-ruffle commandeered to represent the little dog who “_knows_ that skirts aren’t there for him to sit upon!” And _I’m_ not “there to be sat upon” any more, either! I’m beginning to wonder how the Governor managed to “take me in” for so long! Why, he is a regular _fraud_! And a fraud found out is never terrifying—even if it’s exasperating. If anyone is going to be alarmed now, it’s not his official _fiancée_, but he himself; for he was—yes, positively!—nervous and embarrassed at dinner. If that had been the first time I’d met him I should have thought that the big and blonde and silent young man opposite was _deadly shy of me_! Of _me_; after all that he had handed out to me in the way of orders and commands and arrangements during the past fortnight. It is a good thing if, as he says, a good deal of the “strangeness” will be put down to the “natural awkwardness of people so recently engaged”—but it’s a still better thing that I contrived to be rather less “awkward” and speechless than _he_ was! To myself I seemed to be sitting a little apart, watching another Mon—Nancy, I mean—smiling and chatting gaily with his mother and the younger girls. What dears they are! and how one sees their feminine touch in everything about the room, from the arrangement of the many and becoming lights, to the graceful massing of sulphur-coloured pansies and gypsophila in the centre of the round table!