A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain and more in our hearts.  Against the background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him.  There was little to be seen of her but her outline.  Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.  Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.

It was odd to see her here.  He had thought she was at Newnham.

But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her.  And there was something in Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity.  The girl had a kind of instinctive wisdom.  She would understand the quality of his situation better perhaps than any one.  He would put the essentials of that situation as fully and plainly as he could to her.  Perhaps she, with that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of which he stood in need.  She would comprehend both sides of it, the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.

When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen to a loitering pace.  She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead, almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this person would approach from east or west.  She did not observe her father until she was close upon him.

Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless, regarding him.  She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have walked on, that she checked in its inception.  Then she came up to him and stood before him.  “It’s Dad,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were in London, Norah,” he began.

“I came up suddenly.”

“Have you been home?”

“No.  I wasn’t going home.  At least—­not until afterwards.”

Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye again.

“Won’t you sit down, Norah?”

“I don’t know whether I can.”

She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision.  “At least, I will for a minute.”

She sat down.  For a moment neither of them spoke....

“What are you doing here, little Norah?”

She gathered her wits.  Then she spoke rather volubly.  “I know it looks bad, Daddy.  I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France to-morrow.  I had to make excuses—­up there.  I hardly remember what excuses I made.”

“A boy you know?”

“Yes.”

“Do we know him?”

“Not yet.”

For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether.  “Who is this boy?” he asked.

With a perceptible effort Eleanor assumed a tone of commonsense conventionality.  “He’s a boy I met first when we were skating last year.  His sister has the study next to mine.”