“And there, dear lady,” concluded the Colonel, “were the eleven dead pigeons.  What had become of the bandicoot no one ever knew.”

Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently inscribed the figure 4 on the margin of her theatre programme.  Almost at the same moment she heard George St. Michael’s voice pattering out a breathless piece of intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly and anyone else who might care to listen.  Francesca galvanised into sudden attention.

“Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest Department.  He’s got nothing but his pay and they can’t be married for four or five years; an absurdly long engagement, don’t you think so?  All very well to wait seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when you probably had others to go on with, and you lived long enough to celebrate your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions it seems a foolish arrangement.”

St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance.  A marriage project that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial gossip-items about bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant aunts and so forth, for an indefinite number of years seemed scarcely decent in his eyes, and there was little satisfaction or importance to be derived from early and special knowledge of an event which loomed as far distant as a Presidential Election or a change of Viceroy.  But to Francesca, who had listened with startled apprehension at the mention of Emmeline Chetrof’s name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness.  Short of entering a nunnery and taking celibate vows, Emmeline could hardly have behaved more conveniently than in tying herself up to a lover whose circumstances made it necessary to relegate marriage to the distant future.  For four or five years Francesca was assured of undisturbed possession of the house in Blue Street, and after that period who knew what might happen?  The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it might even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated years, as sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.  Emmeline might lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might never replace him with another.  A golden possibility of perpetual tenancy of her present home began to float once more through Francesca’s mind.  As long as Emmeline had been unbespoken in the marriage market there had always been the haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded announcement, “a marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place,” in connection with her name.  And now a marriage had been arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never take place.  St. Michael’s information was likely to be correct in this instance; he would never have invented a piece of matrimonial intelligence which gave such little scope for supplementary detail of the kind he loved to supply.  As Francesca turned to watch the fourth act of the play, her mind was singing a paean of thankfulness and exultation.