inexpansive, commoner than they knew. In fact a rather awful moment!
Then Barbara said:

"If there's nothing else, I'm going to bed. Goodnight!"

And as calmly as she had come in, she went out.

When she had regained her room, she locked the door, threw off her
cloak, and looked at herself in the glass. With pleasure she saw how
firmly her teeth were clenched, how her breast was heaving, and how her
eyes seemed to be stabbing herself. And all the time she thought:

"Very well! My dears! Very well!"

CHAPTER XXV

In that mood of rebellious mortification she fell asleep. And, curiously
enough, dreamed not of him whom she had in mind been so furiously
defending, but of Harbinger. She fancied herself in prison, lying in a
cell fashioned like the drawing-room at Sea house; and in the next cell,
into which she could somehow look, Harbinger was digging at the wall
with his nails. She could distinctly see the hair on the back of his
hands, and hear him breathing. The hole he was making grew larger and
larger. Her heart began to beat furiously; she awoke.

She rose with a new and malicious resolution to show no sign of
rebellion, to go through the day as if nothing had happened, to deceive
them all, and then--! Exactly what 'and then' meant, she did not explain
even to herself.

In accordance with this plan of action she presented an untroubled front
at breakfast, went out riding with little Ann, and shopping with her
mother afterwards. Owing to this news of Miltoun the journey to Scotland
had been postponed. She parried with cool ingenuity each attempt made
by Lady Valleys to draw her into conversation on the subject of that
meeting at Gustard's, nor would she talk of her brother; in every other
way she was her usual self. In the afternoon she even volunteered to
accompany her mother to old Lady Harbinger's in the neighbourhood of
Prince's Gate. She knew that Harbinger would be there, and with the
thought of meeting that other at 'five o'clock,' had a cynical pleasure
in thus encountering him. It was so complete a blind to them all! Then,
feeling that she was accomplishing a masterstroke; she even told him, in
her mother's hearing, that she would walk home, and he might come if he
cared. He did care.

But when once she had begun to swing along in the mellow afternoon,
under the mellow trees, where the air was sweetened by the South-West
wind, all that mutinous, reckless mood of hers vanished, she felt
suddenly