Lucy Carmichael [antikvár]

On a fine evening in September Melissa Hallam sat in Kensington Gardens with a young man to whom she had been engaged for three days. They had begun to think of the future and she was tiying to explain her reasons for keeping the engagement a secret as long as possible. " If my mother knows of it first," she said, " my father will be wounded to the quick." John Beauclerc had only just learnt that he was to have a father-in-law. He had always supposed that Mr. Hallam, whose name was never mentioned, must be dead. But it appeared that he had merely left his family and was living by himself in a hotel at Budleigh Salterton. " Can't you," he suggested, " write and tell him first ? " " That would wound my mother to the quick." " You could tell her next morning, just when he was reading your letter. Then they'd know simultaneously." "Ah, but the morning is a bad time with my mother. She is at leisure and able to listen to one. Fatal! She will instantly discover all the objections." " But are there so many objections ? I don't see " " Of course there aren't. None. But that is so dull. My mother believes that life ought to be tense and dramatic. She would prefer one's choice to be disastrous. If you had been born in the gutter, or were tubercular and couldn't support one, she would be most sympathetic. As it is, I must choose a moment when she is involved in some other drama, late for an appointment, too frantic to listen. Then she'll say : Marry anybody you like but don't keep me now ! You don't know my mother." He agreed that he did not. He had only met Mrs. Hallam once and she had frightened him. He had fallen in