It was dreadfully hard luck that at this moment, just when I had lashed myself into a perfervid and poetic heat, and a note of true passion had accordingly come into my tone, that the library door was seen to come open suddenly, if stealthily, and a magnificent being appeared, bearing a salver with more telegrams thereon. “What, three!” cried Grace excitedly. “One’s from the Oval, the other’s Taunton; but what’s the third? Only expecting two. How funny! Yet they’re all addressed ‘Trentham, Hickory’ right enough. Did he say what made him so late, Augustus? Was he _very_ drunk?” “Hextrahordinary hintoxicated, Miss,” said Augustus, retiring with a sniff. How cruel were the Fates! Here was I just playing myself in, getting nicely set, as it were, and beginning to feel at home, when the arrival of these beastly telegrams simply banished me and my remarks from Grace’s mind. And this was the more annoying since I had spent fifty minutes in battering her into listening to what I had to say. “Surrey 401 for 6,” Grace was saying, as she tore out the contents of the first. “Warwickshire’s getting beans, as usual. Hooray! Bobby Abel, run out, 17. That’s a scotch in his wheel! It’ll drop him three places. Brockwell, 109. Tom Hayward, 82. Jephson, 54. Key, not out, 100 exactly. Good of you, Kingsmill! Awf’ly pleased! Do you heaps of good!” I was biting my lips in the meantime and saying, “My dear Grace,” at intervals, in so thin a voice that it went entirely unheeded. The unhappy thing was my conscientiousness. For I felt that I should not be justified in calling my pitiful efforts a veritable proposal, since Grace had persisted in regarding them as nothing more consequent than a feeble joke in rather questionable taste. But, cost what it might, I was going to see the matter through, having once embarked upon it. “Hampshire, 203 all out,” Grace continued. “Somerset, 115 for 5. Wicket must be fiery; yet it shouldn’t be. Wonder if they’ve watered it? Something’s up. Shouldn’t get out like that ’gainst that sort o’ bowling. Wynyard, 70. Oh, and Vernon Hill 42, not out. Tyler, 6 wickets for 90. They’ve been watering the wicket, that’s what they’ve been doing. And now for the third. Hanged if I can tell where it’s from. All the cricket’s come. I’ll open it, though, as my name’s Trentham.” “It might be for somebody else, as there’s one or two other people called Trentham in addition to yourself,” said I, trying to introduce a word by hook or by crook, and being also in that perverted condition of mind when a man longs to say something with a bit of a sting in it. “Really!” said she. “How clever of you to have thought of that, Dimmy! But as ‘Trentham, Hickory’s’ me as much as anybody else, here goes!” Now as the contents of this telegram had so dire an effect on the industrious Miss Grace, and the results of it were so far-reaching, I think it only right that it should have a chapter all to itself. CHAPTER XVI A Telegram from Stoddart