The wooing of Rosamond Fayre

"Love-letters are the paper-currency for kisses, after all. So imagine having to write another girl's love-letters! Imagine an engaged girl who commissioned another girl to kiss her fiancé for her! Really, it wouldn't be much more extraordinary than what she wants me to do!"

And Rosamond Fayre, the secretary-girl (who was incidentally a golden-blonde, goddess built) sat back in the Sheraton chair before the drawing-room of Urquhart's Court, Kent, and gasped again.

"_I_ write to her young man for her? A girl's courtship letter? The sort of live, intimate personal thing that oughtn't to have the trace of a third person's touch about it? It's not my job at all," Rosamond told herself, indignantly. "No one would have thought of giving me such a thing to do--except Eleanor!"

Now the "Eleanor" in question was Miss Urquhart of Urquhart's Court. She was a small olive-skinned brunette, with dark conscientious eyes, a tiny, tight-lipped mouth, and a spare brown hand. That hand wasn't the kind of hand upon which one expects to see the blaze of the sapphire-set-with-diamond engagement ring that Miss Urquhart wore. She was immersed in "good works" of every description.

And because "good works" bring in their train an endless string of business-letters--because Eleanor Urquhart, though she possessed a fine head for figures, lacked the pen of a readier writer, she usually employed the readier click of the typewriter belonging to a lady secretary (who lived at the Court with herself and her father) to cope with her correspondence....

Really reliable secretary-girls are about as plentiful as really Heaven-born cooks, or artists.

The arrangement had been rather reminiscent of the tragedy of those ten little niggers!

For one secretary-girl had contradicted Miss Urquhart. She, of course, went. The next had kept a charitable duchess waiting in the ante-room. The next had appropriated blouses, sent for the Jumble Sale, for her own use. The next had had a South London accent that had jarred too painfully on old Mr. Urquhart's sensitive, scholarly nerves. The next secretary-girl had done worse than all; she had got up a flirtation with the Public-School-educated and handsome young chauffeur at Urquhart's Court! Yea; after dinner she had slipped out into the rose-garden to meet him. This sort of thing Miss Urquhart simply did not understand, did not wish to understand,--and did not mean to have. That secretary-girl left at a moment's notice.

And it was the day after Miss Urquhart had been forced to dismiss her fifth amanuensis in two months that she discovered the favourite of her old school, Rosamond Fayre, the Army Doctor's daughter, now orphaned and penniless except for what she could earn, fainting from over-fatigue in a cash desk at the Hotel Midas, London.

Miss Fayre possessed a clerical training that Miss Urquhart lacked. She possessed also an appearance and a voice that were invaluable in interviews with snobbish subscribers. Lastly she possessed a clear handwriting that Eleanor had admired even to mimicry while the girls were still at school together.

To Miss Fayre, pale and lovely in her black, cotton-backed satin business-frock, Eleanor had offered the vacant post.

Rosamond had wept with delight as she had accepted it. Then and there she had arranged to undertake that endless writing to the President of the Guild of Mothercraft and to the eleven thousand odd members of the Working Girls' Holiday Hostel Club.

Little dreaming of the other letters that she would presently be called upon to write!

Still dazed at the thought of this task, she stared out of the long French window at the grey stone Terrace with steps leading down to the sun-washed lawn, at the famous lime-tree avenue beyond that, and, far beyond that again, the glimpse of flat, blue Kentish Weald, in the midst of which this old house seemed to bask and doze, padded with ivy to its red chimney-stacks. In the late May, before the War, it nestled under the very wing of the Angel of Peace.

Urquhart's Court! A lovely place!

Rosamond was lucky to be there, instead of at the Midas.

But she forgot her "luck" as she remembered the quick, authoritative young voice of Eleanor Urquhart, half an hour ago, giving her instructions in the walled garden where both girls had been gathering flowers to send to a Hospital.

"It's mail-day, the day for Ted's letter, and I haven't a minute now," she had said, standing by the green door. "So, Rosamond, you'll put it together for me, please."

Rosamond had opened her pansy eyes so wide that one would have expected to see blue petals fall out upon her cheeks. She had gasped, "Put it together? You can't mean in my own handwriting?"

"Well--'our' writing! They're so very much alike, Rosamond."

"But you won't want that copy sent?"

"Of course. There isn't t-t-t-time to make another," from Eleanor Urquhart, who, when she was flurried, uncertain, or vexed, showed a danger-signal in the form of a tiny stutter. "Y-y-yes!"

"D'you mean it, Eleanor?"

Apparently Eleanor had meant it. And Rosamond, walking beside her, flower-laden, up the lawn, had said in turn what she meant.

"My darling employerette! I'll do 'anything in reason' to earn my position in this lap of luxury, but it's not in reason to want me to write to an engaged young man and tell him that his sweetheart hasn't got time!"

Fastidious Eleanor had frowned a little. Sometimes Rosamond, in her laughing, careless way, used expressions that made her, Eleanor, feel shy and cold. She disliked the old English word "sweetheart" that came without a thought to Rosamond's lips. "_Sweetheart_"--How Club-girlish! Why, it was almost as bad as "_followers_"! It would be "_walking out with_" next! In a girl like Rosamond, all this was "a pity." However, Eleanor was otherwise satisfied with the Secretary who had proved so efficient, up to now. So, as they reached the Terrace, she explained gravely:

"I don't want you to tell him that. I hate hurting people's feelings, and Ted might not understand why I was so busy. Men don't understand! But I promised he should have a weekly letter, and I never break promises. So I want you to write, Rosamond, as if you were me. Sign it with my name."

"But--my dear!" from the freshly aghast Rosamond. "That's impossible! Can't you understand? Heavens! It--it would be a kind of forgery!"

"No, it wouldn't. Not if I tell--ask you to do it. You wrote and signed for me those dinner-invitations."

"Dinner-invitations, yes. But a girl's l--her personal letter to a man--no! I simply couldn't."

"Why not, Rosamond? You've known more men than I have. You do sometimes write----"

"To admirers?" The secretary stopped. In Eleanor's little dark "shut" face she had observed that this too was a disapproved-of expression. "Men-friends of my own, perhaps! But never ... never a real love-letter; sheets and sheets, tiny handwriting, five postscripts, snapshots and pressed pansy enclosed and fourpence extra to pay for postage! I've never yet achieved one of those!"

"Well, n-n-n-nor have I," from the young fiancée, with a new coldness that had chilled the girl who lived on her salary. "You have written my letters before from dictation. You know what I should wish to have said. And you know as well as I do what has been happening here for the last few weeks. It won't take you long, Rosamond."

"No, but--"

"I will give you his last letter to me, so that you may answer any question he puts."

"And what about ... him? ... Mr. Ted Urquhart? Is he supposed to notice no difference----?"

"Why need he notice?" from the girl "he" was to marry. "Those dinner-party people didn't."

"No! But----"

As they reached the ivy-draped front of the house Rosamond was remembering another, a very young man, who, then in College rooms with her brother, had once written to her, "_When the postman brings letters for Fayre, I know when there is one from you! It seems to make a sound of its own, as it's pushed through the letter-box. It's different! I swear this isn't imagination! Won't you ever write to me?_"

Eleanor knew nothing about letters of this sort! She was saying, "It is only so that my fiancé does not miss a mail. That seems to mean so much to a man--Abroad. And I am--as you see--prevented. Come and write in the drawing-room," concluded Miss Urquhart less stiffly, as she passed through the huge open French windows, "it's so cool."