The Ways of Women.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1509, 31 January 1901, Page 24

The Ways of Women.

TO LADY READERS-

The Ladies’ pages of (he “N.Z. Mail * a-re now edited by “ Erie,” wlio will be most happy to receive from her readers any items of interest on dresses, fashions, household hints, cookery, artistic woii, the management of children, gossip, or other topics. Under the head “ Answers to Correspondents ” the editor will endeavour week after week to answer any ir.quirias which may be made.

MISS DOLLY’S FLIRTATION

(“Cassell’s Saturday Journal.”)

“O, yes, I love the Queen’s uniform. 1 simply dote on khaki. If there should exist the misguided) man who would throw himself and his fortune at my foot let him not come in black cloth or Scotch tweed, but khaki-clad and medal-starred, and! if bullet-scarred also so much the better.” “You are not serious, Miss Haverford. There is fun in your laughing eyes-”

“Is there, Mr Grayland? Or are my eyes the -mirror in which you see the amusement in your own heart?” It was an interval between the dancing at a crowded Hunt ball, the more crowded and excited because it was also a farewell gathering of the hunting clans, who would soon be speeding to the Cape, khaki-clad volunteers for the front, yeomen of the Queen. There were some who remdmbered that they might never meet again ; and to cover the sadness at the bottom of their thoughts, laughter and frivolity ran high. There were others, fancy free and fain to roam, who caught the Excitement for a transitory moment, as one catches the measles —because the microbe is about.

Of the latter were Tom Grayland and Dorothy Haverford. Grayalnd glanced at his pretty young partner with some suspicion that she anight be too much in earnest. But her merry eyes belied the charge and reassured him. She was, as he, only amusing herself. “Do you really mean that?” he asked with a fine assumption of earnestness. “Given offers of marriage from a titled civilian and a mere commoner -in. khaki, would you really choose the latter ?**

“Inevitably,” she murmured, effectively* drooping her ©yes. “I am a fatalist. It is my fate”’ “And I,” he said, looking into interminable space, “am a fatalist too.” “Indeed?"

“Yen. I must be a fatalist too, for there are not two women in the wide world that I would ask-to marry me.” “Not at the game time, of course,” she replied, with a little laugh that seemed to ask for a closer indication of his preference.

“Not at all.” ‘Does that make you a fatalist, Mr Grayland ?” “Why not* She is my fate. Therefore, lam a fatalist. Is it not your own argument?” “I—-I suppose it is.” “She certainly is a very pretty girl,” thought Grayland. “Odds on that she has married a title before I come back to England. Still, ‘make hay while the sunshines’ is a good enough proverb for me.”

“Ho isn't half a bad-looking man,'' reflected Dolly. “If > he should come back from the Cape with a V.C. on his breast he’ll marry a pile jjf money and set the old mortgaged house on its legs again. Well, I’ve got him for this evening, and Til get as much fun out of him as possible. He’ll be gone m a week. He’ll forget me in, less. Here goes !'*

A few days later Dorothy Haverford was standing at her garden gate beside her bicycle when a telegram boy came up. . “Miss Haverford, miss?” inquired the youth. “For me? Thank you. With wondering conjectures she opened the message—“To Miss Haverford, The Dell, i? oxlight.—Come to the station early as possible. Have something to ask and more to tell. Must come to the Deli if you do not to*the station. “YOUR GENTLEMAN IN KHAKI.

Dorothy Haverford gathered the lull significance of the sentences in the note, and' her face out coloured! the Union Jack. In quick succession it went red, white and blue, and ended by taking a greenish tinge. “What have I done ? What have I done?” she wailed. “Well, Dolly, what have you done?” queried her elder sister, Joan, pushing her cycle through the gateway. They were about to ride to the station to see the Foxlight Yeomanry entrain for London, en route to Southampton.” Dorothy gasped and took on yet another shade of countenance. She w r as as angry now as before she had been afraid. “You—were —eavesdropping, Joan!” she cried, bursting into tears. “You —- you mean thing!” Joan forgot the insult in her amazement.

“My dear, it was impossible that 1 should not have heard. I was close behind you when you cried aloud.” “Yes, you’re always shadowing me now, since you came home. You may be my elder sister—you are my elder sister —goodness knows how much older !—but you are not my father or mother, or even my guardian or keeper. When I want a detective to shadow mv footsteps I’ll let you know.” “My dear Dolly, you know as well as I that we had arranged to ride to the station together to see the volunteers entrain. You were actually waiting for me to join you, chafing because I was rather late.”

“You always are late. You take more hours than I do minutes to get yourself up whenever you step outside the house. I suppose learnt that up in London. Not but what you need the time you take. btill, you can go and see the volunteers entrain.” “Aren’t you coming too ? “No. You are old enough, in all conscience, to look after yourself, and—and ugly enough too! Go away. I don’t want to see you again for —for days.”

Dolly hastily wiped away her tears, and pushed! open the gate with a revengeful vigour. But she had scarcely got inside when there flashed across her whirling brain an escape from her difficult position, so simple both of design and accomplishment, that she swung upon her heel and called her sister back.

“Joan! - Dear Joan! Forgive me. I was in such dire distress. I was just mad, and I was so rude to you, Joey dear, that —that—I’m almost ashamed to—to ask you to do anything for me now. Yet —if you refuse —oh, Joan, dear, I am lost! lost! lost!” “My dear Dolly, only say what I can do to help you. I have quite forgotten what you said just now. I don’t think you were rude; only a trifle upset. What is it, little girl?” “That . . . Read it, Joan. It’s from Tom Grayland, who lives at the Manor House. But perhaps you don’t remember him. I—l did flirt with him a little at the Hunt ball the other night, but as I live, Joan, I thought he was doing the same. If I had only dreamed that he was in earnest ! But it’s too late to regret it now! And he is in love with me, and thinks I am with him. And ! I’m not —oh, no, Joan, not even a little bit. And I daren’t go to the station and tell him so. Fancy, before! all the others too! It would be too dreadful! Yet, if I don’t go, he will come here, and—and what will napa say ?” Dolly fell to quietly weeping again, while Joan kept her eyes on the telegram, while her lips were pressed and her brows contracted, for she, too, had once received a message signed “Your Gentleman in Khaki,” and 1 the recollection brought the tears to her eyes—tears that had to be repressed, for the secret was her own.

She had met him in London, where, until quite recently, she had played the part of companion to a wealthy old aunt, and, despite the fact thaT he was cold-shouldered by her aunt’s familiars, she had found ways of meeting him and of listening to his words of love and adoration, the first and only of their kind that had ever been directed to her (now) not ouite youthful ears. She loved him ; she trusted him. Then he disappeared. Later, a cable from Capetown merely said, “Am making for

the front.” Then silence again; then —a line in an evening newspaper, “Remington’s Guides —Killed : Trooner Douglas May.” And that was the end. “Joan, dear. ' “Yes, Dolly.” “Will you go and see Mr Grayland and explain that —that he is mistaken, that I can never like him enough to marry him, and that the sooner he puts all thoughts of me out of his head the better for both of us? Will you, Joan? There’s a darling. I know it’s an awkward mission, dearie, but you are so good, so tactful, so wise, and gracious and charming, that he will take it all from you as if you were doing him a great service. Do say you will ?” Joan swallowed her own sad recollections with a gulp. “Of course, I’ll do my best, Dolly. I don’t know the young man, but I’ll do my best. Cheer up, little girl. One learns wisdom with age—and the folly of being wise at the same time,” mentally added Joan, as she mounted her machine, and, with a cheery shake of the hand to her sister (yet how her heart ached!) rode away on her mission.

111. All Foxlight, Dolly Haverford excepted, was at the railway station. Enthusiasm being bottled 1 up for the hnai send-off, people stood about in groups and laughed and talked, whispered and guffawed, as their various natures prompted them. “Yes, Miss Haverford. That is Tom Grayland yonder, the one who is laughing so boisterously. He wears a peacock’s feather in his cap.” With the full weight of her responsibility on her shoulders, Joan stole between the groups and attracted the eye of Tom Grayland. “May I speak a word with you ?” “Certainly.” “You sent a telegram to my sister just now.” “I—-—? A telegram? I fancy there is a mistake/’ “I mean to Miss Dorothy Haverford, at the Dell. Didn't you send her a telegram ?” “No.” “But—but ” Joan was prepared for anything, but this denial. ‘My sister told me •” In her confusion Joan shifted her eyes, and straightway her confusion flushed to deep agitation. “I sent a telegram to Miss Haverford just now. Perhaps •” The tall, soldierly-looking, sunburnt man who had stepped out of a neighbouring group rushed forward and caught Joan as she reeled towards the platform edge. “Joan! Don’t faint, my girl. I didn’t think to frighten you like this. One reason for sending the telegram was to apprise you of my arrival. x couldn’t find you up at the old house in town, so I came down here and discovered your address. You don’t mean to say that you still thought 1 was killed ? I know the report was contradicted some time afterwards. First killed, then missing, then severely wounded. The last was true enough or I shouldn’t be here now; but, Joan, I have cornel back cleared of the disodour that clung to me up in town. Come in the waiting-room. I must tell you that at once.” He led her, others instinctively giving way, to the little waiting-room, ana, having seen her comfortably seated, opened a window to let the c.quntry air in and shut the door to keep the country ears out.

“Joan, you know what they charged me with years ago in that North-West Indian affair—cowardice. I admitted it. I admit it now. I was a coward. I funked the job. But it was my nrst action—my first moment under an enemy’s fire, and I believe that many a better man than myself has momentarily turned coward under similar circumstances. But they have had a second chance to redeem the weakness of a moment. I hadn’t. I was badly wounded in that moment of indecision, and the man who had witnessed it called me coward.

“Joan, my girl, I have at last wiped away the opprobrium. I have been in action a dozen times. -1 have ridden the veldt alone through the blackest or black nights, and brought back news of the enemy that has been found useful, that has earnea me the plaudits of the Commander-in-Chief himself. And—and, Joan, I saved the life of the man who, years ago in North-West India, called me coward and afterwards wafted my disgrace to England. Joan, I am a man again, a man among men. I dare say now what has almost choked me in the keeping back so long. I love you, Joan.” Looking up, her pale face radiant witu joy, Joan saw, through the window tnat commanded a view of the platform, her *

sister Dorothy laughing with Tom Grayland. Dolly’s intense curiosity had led her to follow'her sister at a discreet distance. Arriving at the station she had heard (it was common property now) of the mistaken telegram, ana had promptly taken up her flirtation with Tom Grayland at the point where it had been broken off at the Hunt ball.