“Still, you might have prepared me for this, my dear fellow. You might have given your heart-broken rival some warning. Let me down a bit gently, eh? about how you were robbing me of the one girl I’d hoped might solace my declining years. Met Miss Trant, Mrs. Waters? Bless my life, rather! Used to billet myself for months at Colonel Trant’s house in the old days—ripping old place it was, too; gorgeous beech avenue; lawn something like your own here, but sweeping away down to the river—oh, ripping! What’s become of the place now, Miss Monica; let, I suppose?” “Sold,” I said, shortly. Without looking up from the patch of carpet on which Missis’s little dog slumbered with his muzzle resting against my shoe, I could feel the change that came into my employer’s grey glance—the half-disconcerted “M’m. News to _me_, all this!” expression that just flicked across his face. His mother’s hand made a little movement towards mine—and for some reason I felt that she was a little sorry.... I was furious! Why on earth couldn’t this little he-gossip—though why they should understand by the word “gossip” an old woman, I never _shall_ know—why couldn’t he allow these people to go on thinking that the typist her employer had chosen to honour had never been before inside any sort of house but one of a row of seventy or eighty, all with the same sort of pot-plants hiding what lay beyond the Nottingham lace curtained windows, with the same neat front door, and the same metaphorical wolf crouched grimly in front of it! Desperately I wished that something might suddenly deprive Major Montresor of the power of speech, only I suppose nothing ever could do _that_! Evidently he wasn’t going to spare me anything. I was to stand full in the limelight of other days. “Hope the new tenants will keep it up as they should, then, that’s all”—genially. “They took on the fishing with it, I suppose? ‘Everything went together.’ What? I see. Hope they’ll take as much pride as your poor father did in those magnificent hot-houses of his. Ah, I’ve never tasted peaches like those, anywhere else! Remember how you used to race me down to get the finest peach before breakfast, Monica? Yes, hang it all, I think I shall have to ask your leave to go on calling her that, Waters. Loved her from childhood’s hour, y’see. Her childhood’s, not mine, of course!” “Oh,” murmured the Governor. Miss Robinson would have been kept in high spirits for the next week by that “Oh.”