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the fascinating Father, and perhaps there was a modicum of truth in that acknowledgment too. I took my leave of Fanny Meyrick, and walked home a wiser man. But the trusty messenger, who arrived three days later, was not, as I had hoped, young Bunker or young Anybody. It was simply Mrs. D----, with a large traveling party. They came straight to London, and summoned me at once to the Langham Hotel. I suppose I looked somewhat amazed at sight of the portly lady, whom I had last seen driving round Central Park. But the twin Skye terriers who tumbled in after her assured me of her identity soon enough. "Mr. D---- charged me, Mr. Munro," she began after our first ceremonious greeting, "to give this into no hands but yours. I have kept it securely with my diamonds, and those I always carry about me." From what well-stitched diamond receptacle she had extracted the paper I did not suffer myself to conjecture, but the document was strongly perfumed with violet powder. "You see, I was coming over," she proceeded to explain, "in any event, and when Mr. D---- talked of sending Bunker--I think it was Bunker--with us, I persuaded him to let me be messenger instead. It wasn't worth while, you know, to have any more people leave the office, you being away, and--Oh, Ada, my dear, here is Mr. Munro!" As Ada, a slim, willowy creature, with the _surprised_ look in her eyes that has become the fashion of late, came gliding up to me, I thought that the reason for young Bunker's omission from the party was possibly before me. Bother on her matrimonial, or rather anti-matrimonial, devices! Her maternal solicitude lest Ada should be charmed with the poor young clerk on the passage over had cost me weeks of longer stay. For at this stage a request for any further transfer would have been ridiculous and wrong. As easy to settle it now as to arrange for any one else; so the first of April found me still in London, but leaving it on the morrow for home. "Bessie is in Lenox, I think," Fanny Meyrick had said to me as I bade her good-bye. "What! You have heard from her?" "No, but I heard incidentally from one of my Boston friends this morning that he had seen her there, standing on the church steps." I winced, and a deeper glow came into Fanny's cheek. "You will give her my letter? I would have written to her also, but it was indeed only this morning that I heard. You will give her that?" "I have kept it for her," I sai
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