n front of it a Terai. The knots and broken pale that made the
garden-fence scalable, and gave access to the fields behind, were still
to be traced. And here against a wall were the plum-trees. In spite of
God and wasps and her father, she had stolen plums; and once because of
discovered misdeeds, and once because she had realized that her mother
was dead, she had lain on her face in the unmown grass, beneath the
elm-trees that came beyond the vegetables, and poured out her soul in
weeping.

Remote little Ann Veronica! She would never know the heart of that child
again! That child had loved fairy princes with velvet suits and golden
locks, and she was in love with a real man named Capes, with little
gleams of gold on his cheek and a pleasant voice and firm and shapely
hands. She was going to him soon and certainly, going to his strong,
embracing arms. She was going through a new world with him side by side.
She had been so busy with life that, for a vast gulf of time, as it
seemed, she had given no thought to those ancient, imagined things of
her childhood. Now, abruptly, they were real again, though very distant,
and she had come to say farewell to them across one sundering year.

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 pi