It was undoubtedly a vigorous epistle, and Ardmore felt the thrill of its rhetorical sentences as he read. The official letter paper on which it was typewritten, and the signature of William Dangerfield, governor of North Carolina, affixed in a bold hand, were sobering in themselves. The dignity and authority of one of the sovereign American states was represented here, and he handed the paper back to Miss Dangerfield as tenderly as though it had been the original draft of Magna Charta. "It's a corker, all right." "I don't much like the way it ends. It says, right here"--and she bent forward and pointed to the place under criticism--"it says, 'Trusting to your sense of equity, and relying upon a continuance of the traditional friendship between your state and mine, I am, sir, awaiting your reply, very respectfully, your obedient servant.' Now, I wouldn't trust to his sense of anything, and that traditional friendship business is just fluffy nonsense, and I wouldn't be anybody's obedient servant. I decided when I wasn't more than fifteen years old, with a lot of other girls in our school, that when we got married we'd never say obey, and we never have, though only three of our class are married yet, but we're all engaged." "Engaged?" "Of course; we're engaged. I'm engaged to Rutherford Gillingwater, the adjutant-general of this state. You couldn't be my private secretary if I wasn't engaged; it wouldn't be proper." The earth was only a flying cinder on which he strove for a foothold. She had announced her engagement to be married with a cool finality that took his breath away; and not realizing the chaos into which she had flung him, she returned demurely to the matter of the letter. "We can't change that letter, because it's signed close to the 'obedient servant' and there's no room. But I'm going to put it into the typewriter and add a postscript." She sat down before the machine and inexpertly rolled the sheet into place; then, with Ardmore helping her to find the keys, she wrote: I demand an imediate reply. "_Demand_ and _immediate_ are both business words. Are you sure there's only one _m_ in immediate? All right, if you know. I reckon a postscript like that doesn't need to be signed. I'll just put 'W. D.' there with papa's stub pen, so it will look really fierce. Now, you're the secretary; you copy it in the copying press and I'll address the envelope." "Don't you have to put the state seal on it?" asked Ardmore. "Of course not. You have to get that from the secretary of state, and I don't like him; he has such funny whiskers, and calls me little girl. Besides, you never put the seal on a letter; it's only necessary for official documents."