useful on landing.
He is a good thirty-five, staid, and level-headed. It's quite
conventional, I suppose? I never know about these things. Book your
passage in good time, and cheer Dorothea by the news. Write at once,
no! in my present state of health I don't feel up to waiting five whole
weeks. I have _not_ been fit--feverish, sleepless--so am not in the
mood for patience. Cable just one word--the name of the steamer--to our
code address. When I read that I'll know that your passage is booked.

"Oh, my Katrine--sorry! I'll be more careful--

"Yours,

"J.C.D. Blair."

Cable message from Katrine Beverley to Dorothea Middleton: "Accept
invitation. Sail by _Bremen_."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

"Cumly, _January 2, 19--_.

"Dear Autocrat,

"I _We_ done it! I've given in, and sent off the cable. By now you
will have seen it, and be either chortling with triumph, or wishing
remorsefully that you'd left well alone. I hope it's the former,
because, to be candid, I'm chortling myself. Oh, I'm so glad! I wanted
so _badly_ to say `yes.' It _was_ clever of you to make it appear so
clearly my duty to do just the one thing I wanted above all others!

"Hurrah! For a whole year I am free. The office, the surgery, the
kitchen, and the stage, can retire gracefully into the background. I'm
going out to India with a box full of new clothes, to stay with my
dearest friend, and have a good time. Inadvertently also to meet a nice
man...

"Oh, Jim, I _hope_ you are nice--my kind of nice! I hope, hope, hope
with all my heart that I shall tumble right in love with you the moment
we meet, and that you'll do ditto with me, and that we'll go on tumbling
all our lives.

"I've no pride left this morning; I'm so excited and glad. Martin put
his arm round me on Wednesday when I told him of my cable, and swung me
off my feet. `Now everything is perfect!' he said. `You will be happy
as well as I.' And he has been so dear and generous, insisting that he
owes me no end of money for my work for him, and I have been to town to
buy clothes, Lonely Man, scrumptious clothes, with Grizel to help,
because I should like--Dorothea--to see me look nice!

"Grizel is the most bracing person to shop with. When you think it's
extravagant, she calls it cheap, and when you are wondering if you
_dare_ have one, she orders a dozen, and just for once in a way, when
you've been careful all your life, it _is_ lovely to go a bust.
Besides--