that stolid Scotch Sandy back before the afternoon’s over!”

“Don’t discourage the girl too much before she starts. Still, I wish you weren’t forsaking our room for the afternoons, Miss Trant. We shall miss your merry prattle and your footstep on the stair.”

“Yes, and there won’t be much prattling for you in there,” said Miss Smith. “More like sitting among the mummies and sphinxes and things in the British Museum. Girls, can you imagine Still Waters ‘prattling’ to anybody, even as a little boy?”

“That man was never anything so human as a little boy,” declared Miss Robinson. “He was created grown-up and ready-made and put together like a Remington. Probably in the very act of clicking out—

“‘Contract B.954. Our buyers advise us as under,’ and so on.

“I wouldn’t mind what I betted that he never cried over going to school for the first time, or began to fancy himself more when he’d sat out at a dance and flirted——”

“Flirted! The Governor!” I put in—quite forgetting What would presumably be my cue very soon, and laughing with the others.

[37]

[37]

“You might just as well think of him falling really desperately in love with——”

“Talk-ing, ladies,” broke in the usual voice, followed by the usual lull.

But the usual twinge of fear didn’t visit me this time.

Let Mr. Dundonald report me; let him complain of me, bitterly, to the Governor if he likes! All Caledonia, stern and wild, can’t get me turned out of the Near Oriental now. To-morrow sees me unshakably installed as—the Governor’s private clerk!

I must say Mr. Waters is even more paralysingly alarming to work for in this capacity.

His dictation—Well! Miss Robinson described it. He simply doesn’t realize, doesn’t mean to realize, that “a clerk” is composed of anything more than a pad and a scurrying pencil. He literally does not see that these objects may be trembling in the grasp of the anxious slip of a young woman, who has to guide them! He’s excruciatingly particular about the transcribing of his sheaf of letters. And I shudder—that is, I should have shuddered only last week—to think what would happen to Miss Trant, typist, if she brought in anything to be signed one second after 

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