ightened and loving

Audrie.

XXX

AUDRIE BRENDON TO HER MOTHER

_Aberystwith_,
_August 29th_

Brightest and Best: I have a short reprieve, because Dick has
had to go away again; not to his mother, this time, but to London. A
telegram was forwarded to him from Gloucester, where he had left
sending-on instructions; and he knocked at my door early yesterday
morning (at Tintern) to say he must leave immediately by the first
train. He was excited, because the telegram came from the head of a firm
of well-known private detectives with whom he had been in correspondence
for some time, trying to buy a junior partnership for a few hundreds
left him by his grandmother. There's a chance now that he may get the
partnership, only he must be on the spot, as another man is making an
offer "more advantageous--in some ways." Dick is wild to get in, and
regards this as the opportunity of a lifetime. Doesn't that prove the
type of mind he has? Actually yearning to be in business as a detective!
Well, he's had good practice lately, and I must say he has made the most
of it.

"This call couldn't have come at a worse time, but I must obey it," he
pronounced solemnly, while I peeped through my half-open door, in my
prettiest Ellaline dressing-gown--far too nice to waste on Dick.
Disgusted with life, as I was, I nearly laughed in his face, and _at_
his face; but dared not quite, for fear of enraging him again just when
he appeared to be in a comparatively lenient mood.

He had come to explain and apologize, and in his perky conceit really
seemed to fancy that I might be hurt at his desertion. So when he asked
if I would "bid him good-bye pleasantly, and remember to keep my
promise," I had a small inspiration. I would bid him good-bye
pleasantly, I bargained, provided he let me off keeping the promise
until he should come back; because, I said, it would be humiliating to
plead with Sir Lionel on the very day my _fiance_ turned his back upon
me in order to attend to mere business.

"You call this _mere_ business?" sputtered Dick; and I soothed him, but
persisted firmly, gently, until at last he agreed to grant the reprieve.
I think his own vanity, not my eloquence, obtained the concession,
because it pleased him to believe that I leaned upon him in this crisis.
And of course I had to promise over again, more earnestly than ever,
"not to back out, but to stick to my word."

I must still stick to it, of course (unless a wire