For the whole nature of the grudge I have against him has changed in these few days. The thoughts have gone into the background of all that office drudgery and Near Oriental unpleasantness. I’ve forgotten that I used to hate him as part of a life of being ordered about on a few shillings a week. But when, in accepting this invitation to a house of luxury and leisure, I had the feeling of “coming home” to my old sort of life, I hadn’t realized how many of the feelings belonging to that by-gone life were going to wake up again inside me, indignantly ashamed. I was my father’s daughter. I was well accustomed to the ease and space and comforts of such a house as The Lawn—the Waters don’t suspect that, but I _was_ born to them. I wasn’t born, however, to taking up the position in such a house which he has forced upon me. Dully simmering in my mind, for some time now, has been the thought of this slight which he has put upon me, this insult. This was the thought that softened my voice into the timid and suppressed “office” key, which I felt I couldn’t keep up very much longer. “Have I been saying and doing the wrong things before your people then? I am sorry!” I hoped my voice was not going to run away with me, but I heard myself beginning to lose control over that serviceable meekness as I went on. “It is rather difficult for me, you know. Still, I did think I _seemed_ everything that your _fiancée_ ought to be! I have been trying——” “You have,” admitted Mr. Waters grimly. “Very.” “Do you mean I _haven’t_ been a success, then?” I heard myself demanding quickly. “Oh! Because, if I don’t give satisfaction——” I stopped. It wasn’t my place to finish the sentence with “I had better give notice!” “H’m,” said my employer curtly. “I see.” Did he “see,” I wondered? Did he realize that, though I was bound hand and foot by that absurd muddle of an agreement, he might break it when he chose, and that I was longing, desperately, for him to do so then and there? “It’s very hard,” I explained as evenly as I could, hoping that this explanation would give him his cue, “hard to manage to hit the right note always, and to have to decide every minute upon the way I should naturally behave if I really _were_ engaged; Of course _I’m_ under contract, but——” Here, very suddenly and unexpectedly, Still Waters broke out into a tone I’d never heard from him before. He positively “let himself go” as he lashed out with his walking-stick at an inoffensive dock-leaf in the hedge-row we were passing, and exclaimed: “By Jove! I’d pity any man who was ‘really engaged’ to _you_!”