When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, “Yon Mr. Yaverland’s a most interesting man.”

He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for his heart was making him very uncomfortable.  He wished some crude gesture, some single ugly word, would do it.  “You thought him an interesting man?” he asked naggingly.  “You don’t surprise me.  It was a bit too plain you thought so.  I’ll thank you not to be so forward with a client again.  It’ll give the office a bad name.  And chatting at the door like that!”

He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for emergencies, a book of court plaster.

“I’m sure I’ll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville,” he said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of the door.  “Good night.”

IV

She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.

“It can’t hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn’t true.”  She wagged a pedagogic finger at herself.  “See here!  Think of it in terms of Euclid.  If you do a faulty proof by superposition and haven’t remembered the theorem rightly, you can go on saying, ‘Lay ab along de’ till all’s blue and you’ll never make C coincide with F. In the same way Mr. Philip can blether to his silly heart’s content and he’ll never prove that I’m a bold girl.  Me, Ellen Melville, who cares for nothing in the world except the enfranchisement of women and getting on....”

She felt better.  “There’s nothing in life you can’t get the better of by thinking about it,” she said sententiously, and fell to dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief.  She could easily pass off her tearstains as the marks of a bad cold.  “It’s a dreadful thing to rejoice in another body’s affliction, but sometimes I’m glad mother’s so short-sighted.

“He wanted to make me unhappy, but he did not know how,” she thought, with a sudden renewal of rage.  “Now I should have minded awful if he had noticed that slip I made about the Brazilians talking Spanish.  It was a mercy yon man Yaverland thought I was thinking of the Argentine.”  But indeed the stranger would never have wanted to hurt her; she felt sure that he was either very kind to people or very indifferent.  She began to recall him delightedly, to see him standing in the villa garden against a hedge of scarlet flowers that marched as tall as soldiers beside a marble wall, to see him moving, dark and always a little fierce, through a world of beauty she was now too fatigued to imagine save as a kind of solidification of a sunset.  Dreamily she moved to the little house in the corner....

It was her habit to let herself in with the latchkey just as if she were the man of the house.