'er." She was on the very verge of a vegetarian meal
before she recovered her head again. Obeying some fine instinct, she had
come to the prison in a dark veil, but she had pushed this up to kiss
Ann Veronica and never drawn it down again. Eggs were procured for her,
and she sat out the subsequent emotions and eloquence with the dignity
becoming an injured lady of good family. The quiet encounter and
home-coming Ann Veronica and she had contemplated was entirely
disorganized by this misadventure; there were no adequate explanations,
and after they had settled things at Ann Veronica's lodgings, they
reached home in the early afternoon estranged and depressed, with
headaches and the trumpet voice of the indomitable Kitty Brett still
ringing in their ears.

"Dreadful women, my dear!" said Miss Stanley. "And some of them quite
pretty and well dressed. No need to do such things. We must never
let your father know we went. Why ever did you let me get into that
wagonette?"

"I thought we had to," said Ann Veronica, who had also been a little
under the compulsion of the marshals of the occasion. "It was very
tiring."

"We will have some tea in the drawing-room as soon as ever we can--and I
will take my things off. I don't think I shall ever care for this bonnet
again. We'll have some buttered toast. Your poor cheeks are quite sunken
and hollow...."

Part 3

When Ann Veronica found herself in her father's study that evening it
seemed to her for a moment as though all the events of the past six
months had been a dream. The big gray spaces of London, the shop-lit,
greasy, shining streets, had become very remote; the biological
laboratory with its work and emotions, the meetings and discussions,
the rides in hansoms with Ramage, were like things in a book read and
closed. The study seemed absolutely unaltered, there was still the same
lamp with a little chip out of the shade, still the same gas fire, still
the same bundle of blue and white papers, it seemed, with the same pink
tape about them, at the elbow of the arm-chair, still the same father.
He sat in much the same attitude, and she stood just as she had stood
when he told her she could not go to the Fadden Dance. Both had dropped
the rather elaborate politeness of the dining-room, and in their faces
an impartial observer would have discovered little lines of obstinate
wilfulness in common; a certain hardness--sharp, indeed, in the father
and softly rounded in the