And before Nedda reached the door she heard the click-click of the machine, reducing Mr. Cuthcott to legibility.

‘I was stupid to come,’ she thought.  ’He must be terribly overworked.  Poor man!  He does say lovely things!’ And, crestfallen, she went along the passages, and once more out into Floodgate Street.  She walked along it frowning, till a man who was selling newspapers said as she passed:  “Mind ye don’t smile, lydy!”

Seeing that he was selling Mr. Cuthcott’s paper, she felt for a coin to buy one, and, while searching, scrutinized the newsvender’s figure, almost entirely hidden by the words: 

      Great housing scheme

      Hope for the million!

on a buff-colored board; while above it, his face, that had not quite blood enough to be scorbutic, was wrapped in the expression of those philosophers to whom a hope would be fatal.  He was, in fact, just what he looked—­a street stoic.  And a dim perception of the great social truth:  “The smell of half a loaf is not better than no bread!” flickered in Nedda’s brain as she passed on.  Was that what Derek was doing with the laborers—­giving them half the smell of a liberty that was not there?  And a sudden craving for her father came over her.  He—­he only, was any good, because he, only, loved her enough to feel how distracted and unhappy she was feeling, how afraid of what was coming.  So, making for a Tube station, she took train to Hampstead. . . .

It was past two, and Felix, on the point of his constitutional.  He had left Becket the day after Nedda’s rather startling removal to Joyfields, and since then had done his level best to put the whole Tryst affair, with all its somewhat sinister relevance to her life and his own, out of his mind as something beyond control.  He had but imperfectly succeeded.

Flora, herself not too present-minded, had in these days occasion to speak to him about the absent-minded way in which he fulfilled even the most domestic duties, and Alan was always saying to him, “Buck up, Dad!” With Nedda’s absorption into the little Joyfields whirlpool, the sun shone but dimly for Felix.  And a somewhat febrile attention to ’The Last of the Laborers’ had not brought it up to his expectations.  He fluttered under his buff waistcoat when he saw her coming in at the gate.  She must want something of him!  For to this pitch of resignation, as to his little daughter’s love for him, had he come!  And if she wanted something of him, things would be going wrong again down there!  Nor did the warmth of her embrace, and her:  “Oh!  Dad, it is nice to see you!” remove that instinctive conviction; though delicacy, born of love, forbade him to ask her what she wanted.  Talking of the sky and other matters, thinking how pretty she was looking, he waited for the new, inevitable proof that youth was first, and a mere father only second fiddle now.  A note