Instantly her face fell adorably. In its expression I fancied I detected both indignation against her misinformant and mortification that her dear little attempt at social competence had failed. "Oh!... I'm _so_ sorry!" she murmured, all dejection and shame and rich colour. "Please forgive me!" "It isn't true," I said, "that--that I am actually engaged to be married." Like a flash she was all eagerness again. She had a book in her hand, not a college text-book but a novelette; and probably the whole of the novelette was in her glad change of tone. I was not exactly engaged to be married, but I _was_ in love, and I daresay her brain was already a jumble of surmises about obstinate parents, secret wills, _marriages de convenance_, and true and severed young hearts. "Oh!" she said again. "I'm so--I mean I hope I shall soon be able to--I mean I hope I'm not rude if I----" She floundered, already out of her depth. "Not at all," I said gravely. "I only said I was not formally engaged. There are--other reasons for congratulation after all----" "Oh, then I _do_!" she cried impulsively, with a grateful look that I had helped her out. "I'm _so_ glad!" Then, her ordeal over, she glanced towards the door. But a daring impulse seized me. This was on a Friday night, and I knew that on the morrow she was going to Guildford. "I see you're just leaving," I said. "Would it annoy you if I were to walk a little way with you?" Again the code of her upbringing banished her momentary hesitation. "Unless," I said, "you have already----" "Oh no!" she said, with quick frankness. "I only meant that I nearly always go alone, or else with Miss Windus." "I'm sure Miss Windus can spare you for once. One doesn't get congratulated like this every day," I pressed. She laughed merrily. "Some of us don't get it at all," she said. "With pleasure, Mr Jeffries." I slapped Schmoller back into his place on the shelf, and went off, drunk with bliss, to get my hat and coat. That night I walked with Evie for the first time to Woburn Place. Never had the Bloomsbury streets seemed so short, never the east side of the British Museum so few paces in length. I remember very little of what we talked about, I know she spoke of her visit to Guildford. The invitation, she gave me to understand, was really to her aunt, and it was to the subject of her aunt that she quickly returned when I insinuated a mention of Archie's name. I insinuated it again a minute later, but after that, noticing the way in which she came back to the aunt again, I forbore. "But I'm afraid we can't ask the Merridews back, as we ought," she said, once more socially prescient. "We only have rooms in Woburn Place, you see, and you can't very well ask people all that way just to rooms, can you?" "No," I replied briefly. I was thinking of my own late hospitality to Archie. "We used to have a house, of course, before uncle died, and you know how poky rooms seem after that."