She conversed readily.

She reminded him, incidentally that her aunt would arrive early next day.

He informed her, some time after, of an engagement "to tiffin with a brother officer," and she nodded.
They drove away together while the secretary was at his labour of sorting the heap of autobiographical scraps in a worn dispatch-box, pen and pencil jottings tossed to swell the mess when they had relieved an angry reminiscence.

He noticed, heedlessly at the moment, feminine handwriting on some few clear sheets among them.
Next day he was alone in the library.

He sat before the box, opened it and searched, merely to quiet his annoyance for having left those sheets of the fair amanuensis unexamined.