iddle of their
week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the
equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin
thought it was odd that Braybridge didn't insist; and he made a long
story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss
Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When
Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the
business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each
other's charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs.
Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and--Well,
their engagement has come out, and--" Wanhope paused, with an air that
was at first indefinite, and then definitive.

"You don't mean," Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, "that
that's all you know about it?"

"Yes, that's all I know," Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised
himself at the fact.

"Well!"

Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. "I can
conjecture--we can all conjecture--"

He hesitated; then: "Well, go on with your conjecture," Rulledge said,
forgivingly.

"Why--" Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been
elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his
head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson,
whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes
were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his
temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his
little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. "Private?"

"Come in! come in!" Minver called to him. "Thought you were in Japan?"

"My dear fellow," Halson answered, "you must brush up your contemporary
history. It's more than a fortnight since I was in Japan." He shook
hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at
once: "Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge's engagement? It's
humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes and find the nation
absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I've met here
to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if I
knew how it could have happened."

"And do you?" Rulledge asked.

"I can give a pretty good guess," Halson said, running his merry eyes
over our faces.

"Anybody can give a good guess," Rulledge said. "Wanhope is doing it
now."

"Don't let me interrupt