Ever since their rupture and reconciliation in Florence, their relations had been so uncertain that Owen often wondered if he were her lover.  Whether the reason for these periods of restraint was virtue or indifference he could never be quite sure.  He believed that she always retained her conscience, but he could not forget that her love had once been sufficient compensation for what she suffered from it.  “The stage has not altered her,” he thought, “time has but nourished her idiosyncrasies.”  He had been hoping for one of her sudden and violent returnings to her former self, but such thing would not happen to-day, and hardly knowing what reply to make, he asked if she were free to come to look at some furniture.  She mentioned several engagements, adding that he had made her too many presents already.

She spoke of the rehearsal at considerable length, omitting, somehow, to speak of Ulick, and after lunch she seemed restless and proposed to go out at once.

As they drove off to see the Sheraton sideboard, he asked her if she had seen Ulick Dean.  To her great annoyance she said she had not, and this falsehood spoilt her afternoon for her.  She could not discover why she had told this lie.  The memory rankled in her and continued to take her unaware.  She was tempted to confess the truth to Owen; the very words she thought she should use rose up in her mind several times.  “I told you a lie.  I don’t know why I did, for there was absolutely no reason why I should have said that I had not seen Ulick Dean.”  On Saturday the annoyance which this lie had caused in her was as keen as ever:  and it was not until she had got into her carriage and was driving to Dulwich that her consciousness of it died in the importance of her interview with her father.

In comparing her present attitude of mind with that of last Thursday, she was glad to notice that to-day she could not think that her father would not forgive her.  Her talk on the subject with Ulick had reassured her.  He would not have been so insistent if he had not been sure that her father would forgive her in the end.  But there would be recriminations, and at the very thought of them she felt her courage sink, and she asked herself why he should make her miserable if he was going to forgive her in the end.  Her plans were to talk to him about his choir, and, if that did not succeed, to throw herself on her knees.  She remembered how she had thrown herself on her knees on the morning of the afternoon she had gone away.  And since then she had thrown herself at his feet many times—­every time she sang in the “Valkyrie.”  The scene in which Wotan confides all his troubles and forebodings to Brunnhilde had never been different from the long talks she and her father used to drop into in the dim evenings in Dulwich.  She had cheered him when he came home depressed after a talk with the impossible Father Gordon, as she had since cheered Wotan in his deep brooding over the doom of the gods