“I shan’t need to-night to think the question over. My answer is ‘No!’ I can’t possibly undertake such an arrangement.”

For how can I? How can I accept such an extraordinary position? “Officially” engaged to the Governor—the office tyrant, the mummy, the fault-finding automaton! Fancy “going about” with him, letting everyone imagine that I was actually going to marry him! Fancy playing that Gilbertian part, with no rouge and no fun and no footlights to carry me through it, in a “piece” that went on all day and every day! And fancy—this was almost the most appalling thought of all—fancy having to face all the other girls in the office.

Oh, impossible; quite impossible! I can’t do it. I must summon up all my courage and tell him so to-morrow.

“Well?” whispered Miss Robinson, from the next typing-table. “What did the graven image say? Was he a brute? Is it the sack? Or is he giving you another chance?”

“I think he means to give me another chance,” I murmured. (Such a chance!) “I am——”

[20]

[20]

“Talking, ladies!” broke in the warning. “Miss Trant, it’s generally you, I notice!”

And Mr. Dundonald’s voice brought back the bugbear that has haunted me since twelve this morning—the terror of being penniless and out of work once more.

Oh, if I could only attain to some job, some other job, that would bring me in that princely salary of ten pounds a week! Imagine the blessed relief, the security of knowing that one had five hundred pounds in one glorious, solid lump at one’s back. But then, imagine accepting the Governor’s terms before one earned it! Oh, no!

The bogey “out of work” haunted me down into the Tube lift, along the Embankment, all the way back up our grey Battersea street, with the red-faced pavement-artist who always touches his cap to me, smiles and points to his lurid chalk-drawing of a wreck with the legend: “Like the Artist—On the Rocks!”

“I’m on the rocks myself, Blossom. This is probably the last penny I shall be able to give you!” I told him, with a desperate little laugh.

Then I turned in at the entrance to Marconi Mansions, and climbed up our stone stairs to the cheap but cosy little top-flat which has for six months meant “Home” 

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