I saw that nightmare threat of “the sack” looming again, this time over the heads of three girls who had worked with and always been very decent to me. They—if they stood the least bit in this young office tyrant’s way—could go!

“It’s not only the girls,” I urged, clenching my hands to keep them from shaking, and hating the man who made me so nervous. “It’s—everybody. Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander, they must all know that you scarcely exchanged a word with me until you sent for me yesterday,[31] when we—they all thought you were going to dismiss me——”

[31]

“Ah?” said the Governor coolly.

“—S-so I can’t tell them, right on the top of that, that we are actually engaged to be married! There’ll have to be—some—some other sort of warning!”

“Don’t see the necessity myself,” said Still Waters, fixing those keen grey eyes upon me as if I were a letter-file or a paper-weight, or some other inanimate object that they’d happened to fall upon while he was meditating on other things. I wondered if he were thinking that, sooner than be bothered over this affair, he would sack Mr. Dundonald, Mr. Alexander and his whole staff! “Still, if you prefer it. You mean that there had better be some intermediate stages; that I ought to begin by singling you out from the others, seeing more of you, and so on. Quite so.”

It was uncanny, the cut-and-dried way in which he spoke of proceedings which—well, are always looked upon as so intensely the opposite of cut-and-dried! This affair was the imitation of something very different; still, one hardly expected him to be able to map it all out, like the diagrams in scientific dressmaking!

“Now, how am I supposed to ‘see more’ of you?” he went on, in the same tone as he[32] might have asked, “Where must I join this dotted line to section D?”

[32]

“Ah, I have it.” (The sections were beginning to fit in neatly.) “You will come into my room here each afternoon in Mr. Alexander’s place, and take down my letters.”

“Very well,” I agreed, relapsing into my usual outward meekness and inward rebelliousness.

What a fearful nuisance, to be banished to the Siberia of the Governor’s private room, after the murky but cheery atmosphere of the typists’ “glory-hole,” and the society of three other girls!

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