The long-looked-for day of their departure duly arrived. Two hansoms were drawn up side by side, in front of the house. A white rose in my hair, I sat at the window. A parting smile, a wave of my handkerchief, and my lovers were off. In an instant they were out of sight. For a month they were out of mind, too. After the exhausting emotions I had undergone this period of my life was truly halcyon. I banished my lovers from my memory and enjoyed what was left of the season and of my girlish freedom. In two months I should be an affianced wife and it behoved me to make the best of my short span of spinsterhood. The season waned, fashion drifted to Cowes, I was left alone in empty London. Then my thoughts went back to the two travellers. As day followed day, my anxiety and curiosity mounted proportionately. The forty-eight days went by, but there was no wire. They passed slowly--oh, so slowly--into fifty, while I waited, waited, from dawn to midnight, with ears pricked up, for that double rat-tat which came not or which came about something else. The sands of September dribbled out, and my fate still hung in the balance. I went about the house like an unquiet spirit. In imagination I was seeing those two men sweeping towards me--one from the East of the world, one from the West. And there I stood, rooted to the spot, while from either side a man was speeding inevitably towards me, across oceans and continents, through canals and tunnels, along deserts or rivers, pressing into his service every human and animal force and every blind energy that man had tamed. To my fevered imagination I seemed to be between the jaws of a leviathan, which were closing upon me at a terrific rate, yet which took days to snap together, so wide were they apart, so gigantic was the monster. Which of the jaws would touch me first? The fifties mounted into the sixties, but there was no telegram. The tension became intolerable. Again and again I felt tempted to fly, but a lingering sense of honor kept me to my post. On the sixty-first day my patience was rewarded. Sitting at my window one morning I saw a telegraph-boy sauntering along. He reached the gate. He paused. I rushed to the door and down the steps, seized the envelope and tore it frantically open. "_Coming, but suppose all over._--ARTHUR."