the fascinating Father,
and perhaps there was a modicum of truth in that acknowledgment too.

I took my leave of Fanny Meyrick, and walked home a wiser man.

But the trusty messenger, who arrived three days later, was not, as I
had hoped, young Bunker or young Anybody. It was simply Mrs. D----,
with a large traveling party. They came straight to London, and
summoned me at once to the Langham Hotel.

I suppose I looked somewhat amazed at sight of the portly lady, whom I
had last seen driving round Central Park. But the twin Skye terriers
who tumbled in after her assured me of her identity soon enough.

"Mr. D---- charged me, Mr. Munro," she began after our first
ceremonious greeting, "to give this into no hands but yours. I have
kept it securely with my diamonds, and those I always carry about me."

From what well-stitched diamond receptacle she had extracted the paper
I did not suffer myself to conjecture, but the document was strongly
perfumed with violet powder.

"You see, I was coming over," she proceeded to explain, "in any event,
and when Mr. D---- talked of sending Bunker--I think it was
Bunker--with us, I persuaded him to let me be messenger instead. It
wasn't worth while, you know, to have any more people leave the
office, you being away, and--Oh, Ada, my dear, here is Mr. Munro!"

As Ada, a slim, willowy creature, with the _surprised_ look in her
eyes that has become the fashion of late, came gliding up to me, I
thought that the reason for young Bunker's omission from the party was
possibly before me.

Bother on her matrimonial, or rather anti-matrimonial, devices! Her
maternal solicitude lest Ada should be charmed with the poor young
clerk on the passage over had cost me weeks of longer stay. For at
this stage a request for any further transfer would have been
ridiculous and wrong. As easy to settle it now as to arrange for any
one else; so the first of April found me still in London, but leaving
it on the morrow for home.

"Bessie is in Lenox, I think," Fanny Meyrick had said to me as I bade
her good-bye.

"What! You have heard from her?"

"No, but I heard incidentally from one of my Boston friends this
morning that he had seen her there, standing on the church steps."

I winced, and a deeper glow came into Fanny's cheek.

"You will give her my letter? I would have written to her also, but it
was indeed only this morning that I heard. You will give her that?"

"I have kept it for her," I sai