has been one that I don’t think I shall ever forget, even when I’m a white-haired maiden-lady, with no one to lunch with but[73] a parrot or a tabby-cat, and no man’s “appointments” to consult but those of the individual who has to pay me over my Old Age Pension!

[73]

Silence—a silence that ought to have rejoiced the heart of Mr. Dundonald, reigned throughout the whole long morning. I knew that the girls meant me to realize that Miss Trant, for outraging the code of the self-respecting business-girl, had been “sent to Coventry.”

This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For I flung it down like a gauntlet.

It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy “Gracious!”

The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat, fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie and Miss Holt were probably thinking.

“Miss Trant! D’you mind me asking you if you’re going out with Mr. Waters because you like it, or because you can’t say ‘No’?”

“Who would say ‘No’”—I fenced flippantly—“to a Savoy lunch?”

“Some girls might,” murmured Miss Smith. Miss Robinson, answering not my words, but my[74] tone, said, “Of course it’s none of my business—except that while you’re here you are supposed to be one of us. And I can’t say——”

[74]

“Can’t say what?” I demanded, meeting her shrewd eyes squarely with my defiant ones. She flushed a little, and I was glad. But she stuck to her guns.

“I can’t say that it looks any too well! A man in his position, and a girl in yours! Under those circumstances——”

“You know nothing,” I said, deliberately and coldly, “about the circumstances.”

Still more deliberately I tossed a glance into the inevitably soap-splashed mirror at the set of my hat. Then, without another word, I turned out of the open door and walked to the lift, humming a tune just loud enough for them all to hear.

This time I 

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