THE WOOING OF
ROSAMOND FAYRE
BY
BERTA RUCK
(MRS. OLIVER ONIONS)
Author of "His Official Fiancée"
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1915
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Dedication
(LONDON, NOW)
TO BODO
WHO FIRST TOLD ME STORIES
(FORMBY, LONG AGO)
CONTENTS
PART I
_IN TIME OF PEACE_
CHAPTER
Introduction--Two Girls and a Man-in-the-Air
I "Darling" per pro
II A Man's Answer
III The Meeting
IV The First Call
V The New Moon
VI Plan--and Super-Plan
VII Check!
VIII Crows to Pluck
IX The Wrong Girl
X The Other Girl
XI The Hen-Party
XII The Sound of a Kiss
XIII A White Night
XIV A Paper-Chase
XV Fellow-Conspirators
XVI "Not to be Forwarded"
PART II
_IN TIME OF WAR_
I The Call to Arms
II The White Feather
III The Day
IV "On Account of the War"
V London in Khaki
VI Recruiting-Ribbons
VII The Reservist's Wife
VIII Allies
IX War-Paint
X The Last Line
Postscript--Wish and Fulfilment
THE WOOING OF ROSAMOND FAYRE
_PART I_
IN TIME OF PEACE
INTRODUCTION
TWO GIRLS AND A MAN-IN-THE-AIR
"Love-letters are the paper-currency for kisses, after all. So
imagine having to write another girl's love-letters! Imagine an
engaged girl who commissioned another girl to kiss her _fiancé_ for
her! Really, it wouldn't be much more extraordinary than what she
wants me to do!"
And Rosamond Fayre, the secretary-girl (who was incidentally a
golden-blonde, goddess built) sat back in the Sheraton chair before
the drawing-room of Urquhart's Court, Kent, and gasped again.
"_I_ write to her young man for her? A girl's courtship letter? The
sort of live, intimate personal thing that oughtn't to have the trace
of a third person's touch about it? It's not my job at all,"
Rosamond told herself, indignantly. "No one would have thought of
giving me such a thing to do--except Eleanor!"
Now the "Eleanor" in question was Miss Urquhart of Urquhart's Court.
She was a small olive-skinned brunette, with dark conscientious eyes,
a tiny, tight-lipped mouth, and a spare brown hand. That hand wasn't
the kind of hand upon which one expects to see the blaze of the
sapphire-set-with-diamond engagement ring that Miss Urquhart wore.
She was immersed in "good works" of every description.
And because "good works" bring in their train an endless string of
business-letters--because Eleanor Urquhart, though she possessed a
fine head for figures, lacked the pen of a readier writer, she
usually employed the readier click of the typewriter belonging to a
lady secretary (who lived at the Court with herself and her father)
to cope with her correspondence....
Really reliable secretary-girls are about as plentiful as really
Heaven-born cooks, or artists.
The arrangement had been rather reminiscent of the tragedy of those
ten little niggers!
For one secretary-girl had contradicted Miss Urquhart. She, of
course, went. The next had kept a charitable duchess waiting in the
ante-room. The next had appropriated blouses, sent for the Jumble
Sale, for her own use. The next had had a South London accent that
had jarred too painfully on old Mr. Urquhart's sensitive, scholarly
nerves. The next secretary-girl had done worse than all; she had got
up a flirtation with the Public-School-educated and handsome young
chauffeur at Urquhart's Court! Yea; after dinner she had slipped out
into the rose-garden to meet him. This sort of thing Miss Urquhart
simply did not understand, did not wish to understand,--and did not
mean to have. That secretary-girl left at a moment's notice.
And it was the day after Miss Urquhart had been forced to dismiss her
fifth amanuensis in two months that she discovered the favourite of
her old school, Rosamond Fayre, the Army Doctor's daughter, now
orphaned and penniless except for what she could earn, fainting from
over-fatigue in a cash desk at the Hotel Midas, London.
Miss Fayre possessed a clerical training that Miss Urquhart lacked.
She possessed also an appearance and a voice that were invaluable in
interviews with snobbish subscribers. Lastly she possessed a clear
handwriting that Eleanor had admired even to mimicry while the girls
were still at school together.
To Miss Fayre, pale and lovely in her black, cotton-backed satin
business-frock, Eleanor had offered the vacant post.
Rosamond had wept with delight as she had accepted it. Then and
there she had arranged to undertake that endless writing to the
President of the Guild of Mothercraft and to the eleven thousand odd
members of the Working Girls' Holiday Hostel Club.
Little dreaming of the other letters that she would presently be
called upon to write!
Still dazed at the thought of this task, she stared out of the long
French window at the grey stone Terrace with steps leading down to
the sun-washed lawn, at the famous lime-tree avenue beyond that, and,
far beyond that again, the glimpse of flat, blue Kentish Weald, in
the midst of which this old house seemed to bask and doze, padded
with ivy to its red chimney-stacks. In the late May, before the War,
it nestled under the very wing of the Angel of Peace.
Urquhart's Court! A lovely place!
Rosamond was lucky to be there, instead of at the Midas.
But she forgot her "luck" as she remembered the quick, authoritative
young voice of Eleanor Urquhart, half an hour ago, giving her
instructions in the walled garden where both girls had been gathering
flowers to send to a Hospital.
"It's mail-day, the day for Ted's letter, and I haven't a minute
now," she had said, standing by the green door. "So, Rosamond,
you'll put it together for me, please."
Rosamond had opened her pansy eyes so wide that one would have
expected to see blue petals fall out upon her cheeks. She had
gasped, "Put it together? You can't mean in my own handwriting?"
"Well--'our' writing! They're so very much alike, Rosamond."
"But you won't want _that_ copy sent?"
"Of course. There isn't t-t-t-time to make another," from Eleanor
Urquhart, who, when she was flurried, uncertain, or vexed, showed a
danger-signal in the form of a tiny stutter. "Y-y-yes!"
"D'you mean it, Eleanor?"
Apparently Eleanor had meant it. And Rosamond, walking beside her,
flower-laden, up the lawn, had said in turn what she meant.
"My _darling_ employerette! I'll do 'anything in reason' to earn my
position in this lap of luxury, but it's not in reason to want me to
write to an engaged young man and tell him that his sweetheart hasn't
got time!"
Fastidious Eleanor had frowned a little. Sometimes Rosamond, in her
laughing, careless way, used expressions that made her, Eleanor, feel
shy and cold. She disliked the old English word "sweetheart" that
came without a thought to Rosamond's lips. "_Sweetheart_"--How
Club-girlish! Why, it was almost as bad as "_followers_"! It would
be "_walking out with_" next! In a girl like Rosamond, all this was
"a pity." However, Eleanor was otherwise satisfied with the
Secretary who had proved so efficient, up to now. So, as they
reached the Terrace, she explained gravely:
"I don't want you to tell him that. I hate hurting people's
feelings, and Ted might not understand why I was so busy. Men don't
understand! But I promised he should have a weekly letter, and I
never break promises. So I want you to write, Rosamond, as if you
were me. Sign it with my name."
"But--my dear!" from the freshly aghast Rosamond. "That's
impossible! Can't you understand? Heavens! It--it would be a kind
of forgery!"
"No, it wouldn't. Not if I tell--ask you to do it. You wrote and
signed for me those dinner-invitations."
"Dinner-invitations, yes. But a girl's l--her personal letter to a
man--no! I simply couldn't."
"Why not, Rosamond? You've known more men than I have. You do
sometimes write----"
"To admirers?" The secretary stopped. In Eleanor's little dark
"shut" face she had observed that this too was a disapproved-of
expression. "Men-friends of my own, perhaps! But never ... never a
real love-letter; sheets and sheets, tiny handwriting, five
postscripts, snapshots and pressed pansy enclosed and fourpence extra
to pay for postage! I've never yet achieved one of those!"
"Well, n-n-n-nor have I," from the young _fiancée_, with a new
coldness that had chilled the girl who lived on her salary. "You
have written my letters before from dictation. You know what I
should wish to have said. And you know as well as I do what has been
happening here for the last few weeks. It won't take you long,
Rosamond."
"No, but--"
"I will give you his last letter to me, so that you may answer any
question he puts."
"And what about ... him? ... Mr. Ted Urquhart? Is he supposed to
notice no difference----?"
"Why need he notice?" from the girl "he" was to marry. "Those
dinner-party people didn't."
"No! But----"
As they reached the ivy-draped front of the house Rosamond was
remembering another, a very young man, who, then in College rooms
with her brother, had once written to her, "_When the postman brings
letters for Fayre, I know when there is one from you! It seems to
make a sound of its own, as it's pushed through the letter-box. It's
different! I swear this isn't imagination! Won't you ever write to
me?_"
Eleanor knew nothing about letters of this sort! She was saying, "It
is only so that my _fiancé_ does not miss a mail. That seems to mean
so much to a man--Abroad. And I am--as you see--prevented. Come and
write in the drawing-room," concluded Miss Urquhart less stiffly, as
she passed through the huge open French windows, "it's so cool."
"Not as 'cool' as what she proposes to let me do there!" thought the
reluctant Rosamond, following the small, composed figure of her
girlish employer. "Writing forged letters to a young man-in-the-air!
An engaged man! A man I've never seen!"
"Here you are," Eleanor had said, drawing out the topmost foreign
envelope of a neat pile in a right-hand drawer of her escritoire.
"This is his last. You've got a pen and plenty of ink?--blotting
paper.... It's a twopenny-ha'penny stamp. There are some in the
little red leather box on the left there; and the foreign note-paper
is here.... Now you've got everything you want."
"Stop--Oh, wait a minute! How do I begin?" urged Miss Fayre, with a
vague "_Dearest_" balancing a "_My own Boy_" at the back of her mind.
Surely the "edited" editions of those dictated letters held Eleanor's
own expressions before they were sent off? "If you don't mind
telling me----"
"Begin? Why, 'My dear Ted.' That's all, isn't it? G-G-Good-bye!"
And the secretary-girl had been left alone to her grotesque and
unthinkable and impossible new duty!
CHAPTER I
"DARLING" PER PRO
Sitting there at Eleanor's desk, staring at Eleanor's blotter and
biting the end of her pen, it was long before Rosamond so much as
dipped that pen in the ink.
"Oh, I can't do this," was her first decision. "Can't! Anybody but
that benighted little philanthropic innocent of an Eleanor would
realise that it was quite impossible. She really is--'Handwritings
so alike,' she said! As if that were all there was in a letter! As
if the young man mightn't suspect from a dozen things that it wasn't
the usual letter. He'd be hideously annoyed with her--oh, with both
of us, but I don't matter, I'm just 'the pen.' Perhaps she wouldn't
mind his annoyance? But she must _learn_ to mind! After all, she's
going to be a very different sort of girl presently, one hopes. When
the young man comes home, that will be the crisis! Then, she'll
_grow_ to mind. Then she'll be precious sorry she ever deputed a
mere salaried menial like me to do such a crazy thing! I shall
refuse."
Her blue eyes strayed about the stately old room, from lustre
chandelier to Adams fireplace, its grate hidden by a cataract of
fern. They rested, scarcely seeing it, on a gilt-framed Baxter print
of "The Lover's Letter-box," the picture that shows a pretty
Victorian in a soap-bubble of white muslin skirts, who is slipping a
sealed note into the fork of a hollow tree. How unlike Eleanor's
methods!
Presently came the grim thought: "Eleanor has had secretaries who
'refused' one thing or another. They went!"
And then, "Oh, but I can't go! Not back to all those horrors that
I've only, by good luck and Eleanor's job, just escaped! Orders, in
Cockney accents, from men who ought by rights to be calling me
'Madam'! Compliments, from the same--and worse----
"And what about London in this heat? And the stuffiness? and the
smells? and washing one's own hankies in the bath-room? and the shop
eggs for breakfast? and no room to put one's things? (even supposing
one had 'things' to put!), and how about losing your looks, Rosamond,
my child?" she addressed herself. "How about getting 'washed-out'
with tiredness and round-shouldered with work, and old and out of
mischief before your time?
"No! ... I won't! ... I will, I mean!" And she drew her chair a
little nearer the desk.
"I shall have to pay for the other. Pay by writing letters from
Eleanor to '_her dear Ted_.' Very well!" decided the secretary-girl
with a little reckless laugh. "It's not as if he or she were the
'usual' type of engaged people. It's not as if the whole engagement
weren't--well! rum in the extreme!"
For Eleanor Urquhart's engagement to her cousin Ted was a thing that
never failed to amuse, puzzle and even exasperate her friend,
Rosamond Fayre.
In one way, it was "so business-like."
For what could be more business-like than the action of the young
man? Here he was, left heir to the beautiful old Kentish estate out
of which--unless some better arrangement could be made--he would have
to turn the uncle and the girl-cousin who had always lived there.
And his idea of a "better arrangement" had been to propose to marry
the girl-cousin, who could then continue to live in the place as if
she were the heiress and the mistress thereof--merely keeping house
for one extra in the family, a husband as well as her father.
Satisfactory enough.
Only, how _un_-business-like in another way! That was how it
appeared to Rosamond.
Fancy being prepared to marry and to spend the rest of your life
with--a person _whom you have never even seen_!
For, thanks to one accident after another, the Urquhart cousins had
never happened to meet. Eleanor had found it impossible to leave her
College the last time that Ted Urquhart had stayed with his Uncle at
Urquhart's Court, three years ago. And it was two years after this
visit that General Urquhart, Ted's father, had died where he had
always preferred to live, abroad. The beautiful Kentish mansion,
which had always seemed to belong to the bookish, stay-at-home
brother, had passed by right of entail to that rolling-stone, young
Ted, then prospecting in Mexico; for he was a born traveller,
adventurer, ranger, even as his soldier father had been.
It had been by letter that the curious arrangement of the Urquhart
engagement had been made. And by letter--for Ted, deep in schemes
that were Greek to the home-keeping Urquharts, had remained abroad
from that day to this--the courtship had been carried on.
"If you can call it a courtship!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed when she
had first heard of it. But Eleanor had refused to see anything "odd"
about this contract.
"Why, it's the best possible solution." This was Miss Urquhart's
view. "There's this Court; it's Ted's only home when he isn't
wandering all over the earth. And I must have it for my drawing-room
meetings and for the Working Girls' Garden Parties. And there's the
library for father. He'd never get accustomed to another study. Ted
couldn't turn us out! He said so."
"And is there no happy medium between brutally turning a young woman
out of house and home, and ... marrying her?"
Not in this case, Eleanor had pointed out. How could she be the
mistress of Urquhart's Court unless she were either the daughter or
the wife of the owner?
And the owner himself? Rosamond had put amused, eager questions as
to what he could be like?
Eleanor was not vivid in description. She'd informed Rosamond that
"Father had seemed to like him as much as he ever did like young
men." He had seemed to think Ted Urquhart "nice"--though all his
interests were "out-of-doors" and "crude." He'd said he would have
been a soldier himself but for considering that there "wasn't enough
going on, nowadays," for a man in the Service. Level-headed enough,
Eleanor's father had thought. Then Eleanor had fetched a letter from
this Ted and read aloud:
"I don't know when you're likely to get this. You ask me how I got
to this place; well, it's in a steamer from Southampton--then a three
days' journey by train up-country to where the line runs out, then
three more days up a river in canoes. Then mules. This last journey
we couldn't even use mules, because of our machinery. We had to take
the castings of it in big pieces, so somehow we managed to cart along
the pieces ourselves over the roughest parts; don't ask what we wore,
or looked like at this job"----
Here Rosamond had lifted her bright head.
"My dear! Do you know, he sounds rather a ripper to me. Why does
this type of young man always live Abroad, where one doesn't see him?
Why don't they raise a splendid great Army of them, for Home? Do
read me some more, Eleanor!"
Eleanor's incongruously precise little voice had read out scraps
about runaway mustangs, tornadoes, the mild excitement of an
earthquake, of a ride in front of a runaway bull.
"And he always seems to be getting among people with knives and
revolvers 'going for' each other. Or else nearly breaking his neck
somewhere----"
Rosamond's eyes had danced over this description.
"I say, what a lovely man! Good-looking?"
"I've no photograph; I lost the snapshots he sent," Eleanor had said.
"Father said not."
"Fathers are the worst possible judges of looks in young men. I do
like him for hoisting about those great hulking castings! So
different from anything we ever have to do!" the secretary-girl had
sighed whimsically. "And his being so keen on concessions for that
oil they're prospecting about! What's the oil for, Eleanor?"
"Lamps, I expect,"
"Ah! You've never written to ask! You can't be really fearfully
interested in this man!"
"Rosamond, no girl would be 'fearfully interested' in a man she
hadn't seen."
"Oh, wouldn't she? Not when she'd promised to marry him? Not when
he was going to be all that in her life? A _fiancé_! Well, if he's
nothing else, _he is at least the man who keeps the other men out_!"
Eleanor had said nothing. Extraordinary, the interest that Rosamond
showed in this subject! Rosamond had continued:
"And you've all his letters to piece him together out of! To keep
guessing about! _I_ could imagine a girl being perfectly thrilled
over a _fiancé_ of that sort. Much more so than over an ordinary
young man with a bowler and a walking-stick, say, that she had seen!"
"Yes, but you're romantic. I am not. I'm so practical," Eleanor had
gravely explained. "And I think that it'll make me a very good wife
for a man who will probably spend three-quarters of his time carrying
those castings and things up and down precipices at the other end of
the earth. He's his interests; I've mine. And when we meet, we've
this place in common. I am sure we shall be quite good friends."
"Friends!" Rosamond had echoed, pityingly.
"Some married people who begin by--by adoring each other," Eleanor
had remarked, "end by being n-n-n-not even friends."
"M'm. But then they've had something out of it," her friend and
secretary had said, thinking--"like going to a music-hall show with
one ripping 'turn' in it, and all the rest feeble. Better than
sitting out a whole long dull play without one redeeming laugh!"
Rosamond Fayre had decided. "I'd risk being bored for the rest of my
married life, to pay for a really thrilling courtship!"
"Well, he's practical, too," Eleanor had concluded before she took up
her Club accounts again. "At least from his letters. That's all I
really know about him!"
The letter which Rosamond Fayre had just been given to answer was
certainly "practical" enough.
It was written in the particularly small masculine handwriting which
is so often guided by a particularly large masculine hand, and the
crackling foreign sheet of it had arrived from some out-of-the-way
No-Man's Land beyond the Andes, where Ted Urquhart with a party of
other men had been sinking wells for that precious, that coveted oil.
The rough, open-air camp-life, the bonfires, the tea-tins, the scraps
of men's talk and laughter, the blue, up-curling cloud of
tobacco-smoke, the jingling of horse's harness--a whiff of this
unfamiliar atmosphere seemed brought right over the seas to that
secluded English drawing-room by the few terse sentences of
Urquhart's--well, it certainly could not be called a love-letter,
Rosamond decided, with stars of amusement shining in her
larkspur-blue eyes. It began, "My dear Eleanor," and ended, "Yours
ever affectionately, T.U." Like a brother and sister!
There was a post-script which merely said, "It will be nearly June, I
suppose, by the time this letter gets to the dear old Court. Write
and tell me what is out in the garden, and if those last roses which
Uncle Henry was so keen on have turned out any good. The place ought
to be looking lovely."
"The place looking lovely!" commented Rosamond. "Not even one
question about how the _girl_ is looking! I wonder if he doesn't
even want to know? How sick I shall be if the man I marry--when that
fortunate individual turns up--ever writes like this! He won't,
though. Rosamond's lover won't be 'level-headed'--at any rate, not
as far as anything to do with Rosamond is concerned," decided that
young woman, with a toss of her own beautiful head. "But to work!"
She dipped her pen in the ink and primmed her rather large red
begonia of a mouth into an imitation of Eleanor's small one as she
wrote:--
"My dear Ted,
"Thank you for your letter of April the First. I was very glad to
hear that you were quite well, and that you had arrived safely at
your destination."
("Not that she--Eleanor--really cares a capital Dee how you are, or
where you've arrived," interpolated Eleanor's new secretary, aside.
"It's a matter of life and death to her that five hundred factory
girls should have a rise of a shilling a week in wages, but as to
what happens to a mere prospective husband--Well, but what ought she
to say to him? It's always 'ought' with her. I wonder if she'll get
any better--worse, I mean--when Ted comes home and tries to teach
her--other things, I do hope so. Well----")
She took up her pen again.
"Yes!--The place----"
("Better put a capital P there to show how all-important.")
--"The Place looks delightful. It's a great pity that you can't see
it, since you've missed every June here for so many years. I hope
that you may contrive to come home, as you suggest some time next
summer----"
("That's not too eager and forward, I trust," thought Rosamond.)
--"and that you will not be disappointed in----"
("your reception as a lover.--No, I mean, of course----")
--"the alterations that there are--such as the new fish-pond, and the
continuation of the hedge beyond the cherry-orchard at The Court."
She leant back.
("_Now_ what had I better put? He's not wildly interested in her
crêches and clubs and girls, I can tell. I'll just sum it up
vaguely.")
"I have been very busy lately. We had a garden-party here last week.
Need I add that there was a thunderstorm in the middle of it? The
purple dahlias in Mrs. Bishop's toque got drenched and dripped in
mauve streaks down her face. It looked as if her complexion had run
very badly."
("Steady! Eleanor wouldn't have written that. She never makes fun
of people," said Rosamond. "I shall have to make a fair copy--a
Rosamond Fayre copy--of all this. I'll begin again from
'thunder-storm.'")
"and on Wednesday we had a dinner-party. A friend of mine is staying
here now. She has trained as a clerk, and I am keeping her to help
me with my business correspondence----"
("This very letter, for example.")
--"and her name is Rosamond Fayre."
("Hope you think it's a pretty one, Sir.")
--"Father is quite well now, and sends his love. The roses that you
ask after have done splendidly----"
("Flowers are safe, so I suppose I can say what I like here.")
--"They will trail in heavenly, scenty garlands and festoons of pink
and white round the grey stone balustrades of the Terrace, just like
decorations for a visit from Royalty. Also the 'Blue Border' is
planned out. At the back stand the tallest larkspurs and
delphiniums, then the clumps of deep blue borage; then come the blue
Canterbury bells, then the corn-flowers; then blue pansies, then
forget-me-nots, and lastly a thick blue row of lobelia, 'underlining'
it, I think this is all. So believe me, dear Ted," wrote the girl,
demurely, in the handwriting that was as like her school-friend's as
the voices of some twins are alike,
"Yours ever affectionately,
"R----"
"Oh, how silly," she broke off impatiently, to scribble a thick "E"
over the "R" which she had inadvertently written. Very nearly she
had signed, in spite of everything, her own name. But it didn't
show. No; it read quite evenly and naturally
"_Yours ever affectionately,
"Eleanor Urquhart._"
She must practise that signature. She began to do so on a loose
sheet of paper. Then she must make that fair copy of this epistle.
But there was no particular hurry.... "To think that another
girl--not Eleanor--might, instead of deputing the job to a paid
clerk, be getting quite a lot of fun out of writing love-letters to a
_fiancé_ who'd never set eyes on her!" she reflected as her pen
traced curly "E's" and "U's."
"For instance, _I_--if I were Eleanor--should make quite a good game
out of interesting the man, making him keener to see me every letter
I wrote. (She crosses the 't' in Urquhart more like _this_.) One or
two should be as brief and brisk and business-like as if they came
from the Manager of his Bank. The next should ask him what colours
he liked a girl--_his_ girl--to wear? Then I'd write rather a
piteous one, as if I were begging, between the lines, to be set free
from an arrangement that was spoiling my life, standing in the way of
my possible happiness with somebody else!"
Rosamond, taking out a fresh sheet of paper to make her fair copy,
laughed enjoyingly over this immemorial scheme.
"That would be a good one! But the same mail should bring him
another note asking him whether he did not think that it might not
sometimes seem a tiny bit dull for a girl all alone in this great
Convent of a Court? I should wait until he replied to that, I think."
She tucked the rose she wore into greater security at her breast.
"_Then_," she told herself, "I'd begin to flirt a little; on paper.
There might even be a pet name or so tucked into a postscript--so----"
She began scribbling idly on the rough draft.
--"and crossed out again--not that a man couldn't read it, if he
tried. So!"
She made a charming picture as she sat there, this royally built,
golden-haired girl smiling at the desk, playing this "game" with a
phantom-lover of her own, for at the moment Eleanor and Eleanor's
_fiancé_--probably a milk-sop, and surely a stick!--were forgotten.
Rosamond Fayre, lost in a very silly, very common, and very natural
form of day-dream, was away with the Prince Charming whose elusive
face smiles back into every girlish face that has ever bent over a
wishing-well.
"Of all the over-worked words in the English language, the strangest
seems to be '_Darling_,'" Rosamond Fayre told herself and her
dream-sweetheart of the moment. "You say it to a girl, but it
wouldn't sound silly and out of place to a man--provided it were the
right man. '_My darling!_' Everybody uses it--yet it isn't
hackneyed. Jokes and comic-paper stories and music-hall songs are
cram-full of it--and still it's never, never vulgar----"
Her thoughts broke off, as from the tall white mantel-piece the
clock, held up between two gilded nymphs, chimed twice.
"Half-past four!" she exclaimed. "Mercy! I must take this up for
Eleanor to pass.... H'm. I suppose Eleanor has never written to her
young man in that way in her life. Well, you can't very well dash
off 'darlings' _per pro_. I'll copy this tidily."
She did so. She tore up one letter; then she carried the other to
the big, airy lavender-breathing linen-room where Miss Urquhart,
among the imposing piles of sheets, looked small and dark and busy as
an ant in a snow-drift.
"Eleanor, do you mind looking over this? Will it do?"
"'Do'--oh, yes, dear, I am sure it will do beautifully," said
Eleanor, with the merest perfunctory glance above an armful of
pillow-cases marked URQUHART. HOSTEL. 1914. "Thanks so much,
Rosamond. Will you see that it goes off?"
"What!--As it is?" suggested Rosamond, mischievously. "No
postscripts?"
"Postscripts? What about?" said Eleanor the practical.
"Oh, I don't know," murmured Rosamond.
She herself could have thought of half a dozen tiny written messages
that would have been as a hand waved, a glance thrown, to any young
man who had received them.
"It's really a _waste_ that I haven't any one to write to on my own
account! Except Cecil--No, I'm not going to write to him or to any
one unless it's for the one and only real right reason," decided
Rosamond, even while her employer, holding back that note to her
secretary, decreed, "This says all that's needed."
Rosamond took back that note with a small, half-humourous shrug.
The gesture shook the rose that Rosamond wore in the breast of her
white crêpe shirt into shedding a shower of pink petals upon the open
sheet.
"Ah, I tell you what," said Rosamond, upon one of her sudden
impulses. "_Those_ had better be sent in the letter! Won't you?"
"What? Those loose petals?" said Eleanor over her shoulder. "Why?
Those aren't from the new roses Ted was asking about, are they?"
"Never mind. They're English rose-leaves from an English garden--ah,
think of that, in a foreign country! Don't _you_ think they'd please
any Englishman, far from his home? I know they would," pleaded
Rosamond, in a voice still soft from that day-dream of hers. "Put
them in, Eleanor!"
"Very well, if you like." And the other girl, kind and untouched as
any child, slipped into the crisp grey foreign envelope a dozen
sweetly scented pink petals.
"Those," said Rosamond Fayre, with a smile, "will do instead of a
postscript!"
She did not think again of the saying that the post-script is the
part which contains all that is most interesting in a woman's letter.