She was unusually helpful at breakfast, and unselfish about the eggs:  and then she went off to catch the train before her father’s.  She did this to please him.  He hated travelling second-class with her—­indeed, he never did—­but he also disliked travelling in the same train when his daughter was in an inferior class, because of the look of the thing.  So he liked to go by a different train.  And in the Avenue she had an encounter with Ramage.

It was an odd little encounter, that left vague and dubitable impressions in her mind.  She was aware of him—­a silk-hatted, shiny-black figure on the opposite side of the Avenue; and then, abruptly and startlingly, he crossed the road and saluted and spoke to her.

“I must speak to you,” he said.  “I can’t keep away from you.”

She made some inane response.  She was struck by a change in his appearance.  His eyes looked a little bloodshot to her; his face had lost something of its ruddy freshness.

He began a jerky, broken conversation that lasted until they reached the station, and left her puzzled at its drift and meaning.  She quickened her pace, and so did he, talking at her slightly averted ear.  She made lumpish and inadequate interruptions rather than replies.  At times he seemed to be claiming pity from her; at times he was threatening her with her check and exposure; at times he was boasting of his inflexible will, and how, in the end, he always got what he wanted.  He said that his life was boring and stupid without her.  Something or other—­she did not catch what—­he was damned if he could stand.  He was evidently nervous, and very anxious to be impressive; his projecting eyes sought to dominate.  The crowning aspect of the incident, for her mind, was the discovery that he and her indiscretion with him no longer mattered very much.  Its importance had vanished with her abandonment of compromise.  Even her debt to him was a triviality now.

And of course!  She had a brilliant idea.  It surprised her she hadn’t thought of it before!  She tried to explain that she was going to pay him forty pounds without fail next week.  She said as much to him.  She repeated this breathlessly.

“I was glad you did not send it back again,” he said.

He touched a long-standing sore, and Ann Veronica found herself vainly trying to explain—­the inexplicable.  “It’s because I mean to send it back altogether,” she said.

He ignored her protests in order to pursue some impressive line of his own.

“Here we are, living in the same suburb,” he began.  “We have to be—­modern.”

Her heart leaped within her as she caught that phrase.  That knot also would be cut.  Modern, indeed!  She was going to be as primordial as chipped flint.

Part 2

In the late afternoon, as Ann Veronica was gathering flowers for the dinner-table, her father came strolling across the lawn toward her with an affectation of great deliberation.