Almost before she knew that she had let a precious moment go, she found herself bitterly rueing the fact. One of his odd, quick, unforeseen turns brought her up dead against an impasse she would have given much to avoid. Plunging an impetuous hand in his coat, he suddenly produced a half sheet of notepaper, and tossed it over the table into her lap. “High time,” he laughed, “we let the dear old _Morning Post_ into our _secret de Polichinelle_.” She unfolded the slip of paper and read with a pang of dismay: | An engagement is announced between | | John Endor, only son of the late Myles | | Endor, Wyndham, Middleshire, and | | Lady Elizabeth Endor, and Helen Mary, | | eldest daughter of James Lee Sholto | | and Mrs. Sholto of Longmore, Richmond, | | Virginia, U. S. A. | “Will it meet the case?” The question was whimsically direct, even without the enforcement of his amused eyes. The blood burned slowly vivid in her face. Happily the quality or absence of quality in the electric light prevented his seeing it. “Don’t you think?”--in a gay whisper. There was no escape. “One shrinks----” Her will cut the phrase in two. To have completed it would have been to say too little or too much. “Everybody’s secret,” he laughed. As she felt the knife edge of the irony lurking in the situation, she gave a little gasp. There was only one thing for her now. She must harden her heart. “I hadn’t realized,” she said, in her soft voice, a delicious blend of the Old World and the New, “that your speech to-day was going to be so important.” “Quite the last word for it,” he said, lightly. “A heart-to-heart talk, don’t you know, with a few friends and constituents. For some dark reason they insisted on giving me a lovely bit of old Sheffield plate--and a scroll. One mustn’t forget the scroll. Perhaps the birds have been talking. Anyhow, the Chairman thought the salver would look very nice on the dining-room sideboard of a newly married couple!” He waited for her laugh, but only one tiny segment of her mind was listening. “It fills the entire placard of the _Evening Press_.” She dare not look at him. There was a clutch at her heart. “What! My jawbation! Shade of the sea serpent and the giant gooseberry!” She felt the beat of her heart strike upwards. Her throat was filled by it. He sounded hardly more than a laughing, irresponsible boy. And yet the hour was surely near when even his lighter grace notes must prove organ tones in the strained ear of the time. III The fates were at her elbow. As she sent for the _Evening Press_, she realized that fact to the full. Afraid to turn again to her occupation of the last three hours, the weighing of her love for John Endor, she was yet unable to escape the challenge of a dire event. Truly a woman, yet beyond all things she was an American citizen. No matter what his spells, she could never marry a man of these ideas. Her country must stand first.