“Nothing, I shall be better when I’ve had my tea.”

She had her tea, which after a proper protest on her part was paid for by Rickman.  Then they turned into the cathedral gardens, where it was still pleasant under the trees.  Thus approached from the north-east, the building rose up before them in detached incoherent masses, the curve of its great dome broken by the line of the north transept seen obliquely from below.  It turned a forbidding face citywards, a face of sallow stone blackened by immemorial grime, while the north-west columns of the portico shone almost white against the nearer gloom.

“It’s clever of it to look so beautiful,” murmured Rickman, “when it’s so infernally ugly.”  He stood for a few minutes, lost in admiration of its eccentricity.  Thus interested, he was not aware that his own expression had grown somewhat abstracted, impersonal and cold.

“I call that silly,” said Flossie, looking at him out of the corner of her black eyes.  Had he come there to pay attention—­to the Cathedral?

“Do you?  Why?”

“Because—­I suppose you wouldn’t say I was beautiful if I were—­well, downright ugly?”

“I might, Flossie, if your ugliness was as characteristic, as suggestive as this.”

Flossie shrugged her shoulders (not, he thought, a pretty action in a lady with so short a neck).  To her St. Paul’s was about as beautiful as the Bank and infinitely less “suggestive.”  Mr. Rickman interpreted her apathy as fatigue and looked about for a lonely seat.  They found one under the angle of the transept.

“Let’s sit down here,” he said; “better not exert ourselves violently so soon after tea.”

“For all the tea I’ve had, it wouldn’t matter,” said Flossie as if resenting an ignoble implication.  Rickman laughed a little uncomfortably and blushed.  Perhaps she had hardly given him the right to concern himself with these intimate matters.  Yet from the very first his feeling for Flossie had shown itself in minute cares for her physical well-being.  They sat for a while in silence.  A man passed them smoking; he turned his head to look back at the girl, and the flying ash from his cigarette lighted on her dress.

“Confound the brute!” said Rickman, trying to brush away the obnoxious powder with a touch which would have been more effectual if it had been less of a caress.  She shivered slightly, and he put her cape gently about her shoulders.  A curious garment, Flossie’s cape, made of some thin grey-blue stuff, with gold braid on the collar, cheap, pretty and a little vulgar.

“There’s not much warmth in that thing,” he said, feeling it with his fingers.

“I don’t want to be warm, thank you, a day like this,” she retorted, pushing back the cape.  For, though it was no longer spring, Flossie’s dream tugged at her heartstrings.  There was a dull anger against him in her heart.  At that moment Flossie could have fought savagely for her dream.