He had ears for nothing but the fact.

'Then I am too late!'

'I have heard it to-day.'

'She is engaged! Positively?'

Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. She had to
answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was
from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of
intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart's friend. The
task of answering it was now doubled. 'I fear so, I fancy so,' she said,
and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might
possibly be a loophole behind the lines.

'Then I must make my mind up to it,' said Redworth. 'I think I'll take a
walk.'

She smiled kindly. 'It will be our secret.'

'I thank you with all my heart, Lady Dunstane.'

He was not a weaver of phrases in distress. His blunt reserve was
eloquent of it to her, and she liked him the better; could have thanked
him, too, for leaving her promptly.

When she was alone she took in the contents of the letter at a hasty
glimpse. It was of one paragraph, and fired its shot like a cannon with
the muzzle at her breast:--

'MY OWN EMMY,--I have been asked in marriage by Mr. Warwick, and
have accepted him. Signify your approval, for I have decided that
it is the wisest thing a waif can do. We are to live at The
Crossways for four months of the year, so I shall have Dada in his
best days and all my youngest dreams, my sunrise and morning dew,
surrounding me; my old home for my new one. I write in haste, to
you first, burning to hear from you. Send your blessing to yours in
life and death, through all transformations,
'TONY.'

That was all. Not a word of the lover about to be decorated with the
title of husband. No confession of love, nor a single supplicating word
to her friend, in excuse for the abrupt decision to so grave a step. Her
previous description of, him, as a 'gentlemanly official' in his
appearance, conjured him up most distastefully. True, she might have made
a more lamentable choice; a silly lordling, or a hero of scandals; but if
a gentlemanly official was of stabler mould, he failed to harmonize quite
so well with the idea of a creature like Tony. Perhaps Mr. Redworth also
failed in something. Where was the man fitly to mate her! Mr. Redworth,
however, was manly and trustworthy, of the finest Saxon type in build and
in character. He had great qualities, and his excess of scr