Bohemia one foggy November afternoon, her opportunity being a tea-
party given by Peter Hope to commemorate the birthday of his
adopted daughter and sub-editor, Jane Helen, commonly called Tommy.
The actual date of Tommy's birthday was known only to the gods; but
out of the London mist to wifeless, childless Peter she had come
the evening of a certain November the eighteenth, and therefore by
Peter and his friends November the eighteenth had been marked upon
the calendar as a day on which they should rejoice together.

"It is bound to leak out sooner or later," Susan Fossett was
convinced, "so I may as well tell you: that gaby Mary Ramsbotham
has got herself engaged."

"Nonsense!" was Peter Hope's involuntary ejaculation.

"Precisely what I mean to tell her the very next time I see her,"
added Susan.

"Who to?" demanded Tommy.

"You mean 'to whom.' The preeposition governs the objective case,"
corrected her James Douglas McTear, commonly called "The Wee
Laddie," who himself wrote English better than he spoke it.

"I meant 'to whom,'" explained Tommy.

"Ye didna say it," persisted the Wee Laddie.

"I don't know to whom," replied Miss Ramsbotham's bosom friend,
sipping tea and breathing indignation. "To something idiotic and