t, at any rate, for conscious repossession, was doubtless the
first: the strange little timed silence which she had fully gauged, on
the spot, as altogether beyond her own intention, but which--for just
how long? should she ever really know for just how long?--she could
do nothing to break. She was in the smaller drawing-room, in which she
always "sat," and she had, by calculation, dressed for dinner on finally
coming in. It was a wonder how many things she had calculated in respect
to this small incident--a matter for the importance of which she had
so quite indefinite a measure. He would be late--he would be very late;
that was the one certainty that seemed to look her in the face. There
was still also the possibility that if he drove with Charlotte straight
to Eaton Square he might think it best to remain there even on learning
she had come away. She had left no message for him on any such chance;
this was another of her small shades of decision, though the effect of
it might be to keep him still longer absent. He might suppose she would
already have dined; he might stay, with all he would have to tell, just
on purpose to be nice to her father. She had known him to stretch the
point, to these beautiful ends, far beyond that; he had more than once
stretched it to the sacrifice of the opportunity of dressing.

If she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice, and had made herself,
during the time at her disposal, quite inordinately fresh and quite
positively smart, this had probably added, while she waited and waited,
to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the
image of her having crouched. She did her best, quite intensely, by
herself, to banish any such appearance; she couldn't help it if she
couldn't read her pale novel--ah, that, par exemple, was beyond her!
but she could at least sit by the lamp with the book, sit there with
her newest frock, worn for the first time, sticking out, all round her,
quite stiff and grand; even perhaps a little too stiff and too grand for
a familiar and domestic frock, yet marked none the less, this time,
she ventured to hope, by incontestable intrinsic merit. She had glanced
repeatedly at the clock, but she had refused herself the weak indulgence
of walking up and down, though the act of doing so, she knew, would make
her feel, on the polished floor, with the rustle and the "hang," still
more beautifully bedecked. The difficulty was that it would also make
h