"There's no accounting for tastes, of course," he said rudely, and flung out of the room in a mood of deep disgust. The whole business of Prudence's engagement was profoundly exasperating to him. It obtruded itself at unexpected moments with an insistence that was to his way of thinking indecent. It interfered with his arrangements. So many hours of her time were given to letter writing that the size of the weekly epistle was ever a matter of suspicious amazement to him. He had no means of knowing how long those bald sentences which Prudence sprawled largely with a generous marginal space over the sheet of notepaper took in their composition. He suspected that she wrote reams to the fellow and posted them on the sly. The regular arrival of Mr Morgan's weekly effusion was a further irritation. This was handed usually to Prudence across the breakfast table with ponderous playfulness on brother William's part, and a show of sly surreptitiousness, that drew general attention to the transit from his pocket to her reluctant hand. The sorting of the letters was accompanied by such facetious subtleties as "Do we behold a billet doux?" or the murmured misquotation: "He sent a letter to his love." And the bulky envelope would be passed to her to the accompaniment of appreciative giggles from his sisters, and received by Prudence with as unconcerned an air as the trying circumstances made possible, and left by her lying unopened on the table exposed to the general gaze while she finished her meal. She carried her letter away with her and read it in the privacy of her room. "I can't think how you stand it," Bobby said once, when they were alone together. "If Uncle William made such fatuous remarks to me I'd hit him." "I won't give him the satisfaction of seeing how he annoys me," she answered. "William would vulgarise the most sacred thing." "You aren't for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?" Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it. "It's one way out," she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply. CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE. Christmas came and brought with it Edward Morgan's gift to his fiancee, a rope of pearls, so beautiful and costly that Prudence, on taking the shining thing from its bed of velvet, and holding it in her hands, was moved with a sense of remorse at the inadequacy of the return she was making this man, who showered gifts upon her in token of his love. She did not want his presents; they were an embarrassment and a distress.