Then, as she handed me a tiny porcelain cup, steaming and fragrant, “I should never have congratulated you, Charlie, on board the steamer if I had known it was going to end in this way.”

This way!  Then Bessie must have told her.

“End?” I said stammering:  “what—­what end?”

“In wearing you out.  Bessie told me at Lenox, the day we took that long walk, that you had this important case, and it was a great thing for a young lawyer to have such responsibility.”

Poor little porcelain cup!  It fell in fragments on the floor as I jumped to my feet:  “Was that all she told you?  Didn’t she tell you that we were engaged?”

For a moment Fanny did not speak.  The scarlet glow on her cheek, the steady glow that was always there, died away suddenly and left her pale as ashes.  Mechanically she opened and shut the silver sugar-tongs that lay on the table under her hand, and her eyes were fixed on me with a wild, beseeching expression.

“Did you not know,” I said in softer tones, still standing by the table and looking down on her, “that day at Lenox that we were engaged?  Was it not for that you congratulated me on board the steamer?”

A deep-drawn sigh as she whispered, “Indeed, no!  Oh dear! what have I done?”

“You?—­nothing!” I said with a sickly smile; “but there is some mistake, some mystery.  I have never had one line from Bessie since I reached London, and when I left her she was my own darling little wife that was to be.”

Still Fanny sat pale as ashes, looking into the fire and muttering to herself.  “Heavens!  To think—­Oh, Charlie,” with a sudden burst, “it’s all my doing!  How can I ever tell you?”

“You hear from Bessie, then?  Is she—­is she well?  Where is she?  What is all this?” And I seated myself again and tried to speak calmly, for I saw that something very painful was to be said—­something that she could hardly say; and I wanted to help her, though how I knew not.

At this moment the door opened and “papa” came in.  He evidently saw that he had entered upon a scene as his quick eye took in the situation, but whether I was accepted or rejected as the future son-in-law even his penetration was at fault to discover.

“Oh, papa,” said Fanny, rising with evident relief, “just come and talk to Mr. Munro while I get him a package he wants to take with him.”

It took a long time to prepare that package.  Mr. Meyrick, a cool, shrewd man of the world, was taking a mental inventory of me, I felt all the time.  I was conscious that I talked incoherently and like a school-boy of the treaty.  Every American in London was bound to have his special opinion thereupon, and Meyrick, I found, was of the English party.  Then we discussed the special business which had brought me to England.

“A very unpresentable son-in-law,” I read in his eye, while he was evidently astonished at his daughter’s prolonged absence.