He held out his hands, and she also stood up.

He drew her close up to him with a strong, steady pull.  Then suddenly, in front of all those windows, he folded her in his arms and pressed her to him, and kissed her unresisting face.

“Don’t!” cried Ann Veronica, struggling faintly, and he released her.

“Forgive me,” he said.  “But I am at singing-pitch.”

She had a moment of sheer panic at the thing she had done.  “Mr. Manning,” she said, “for a time—­Will you tell no one?  Will you keep this—­our secret?  I’m doubtful—­Will you please not even tell my aunt?”

“As you will,” he said.  “But if my manner tells!  I cannot help it if that shows.  You only mean a secret for a little time?”

“Just for a little time,” she said; “yes....”

But the ring, and her aunt’s triumphant eye, and a note of approval in her father’s manner, and a novel disposition in him to praise Manning in a just, impartial voice had soon placed very definite qualifications upon that covenanted secrecy.

Part 5

At first the quality of her relationship to Manning seemed moving and beautiful to Ann Veronica.  She admired and rather pitied him, and she was unfeignedly grateful to him.  She even thought that perhaps she might come to love him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly bearing.  She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love.  For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether.  Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife.  She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which distinguishes the ways of the wise.  It would be the wrappered world almost at its best.  She saw herself building up a life upon that—­a life restrained, kindly, beautiful, a little pathetic and altogether dignified; a life of great disciplines and suppressions and extensive reserves...

But the Ramage affair needed clearing up, of course; it was a flaw upon that project.  She had to explain about and pay off that forty pounds....

Then, quite insensibly, her queenliness had declined.  She was never able to trace the changes her attitude had undergone, from the time when she believed herself to be the pampered Queen of Fortune, the crown of a good man’s love (and secretly, but nobly, worshipping some one else), to the time when she realized she was in fact just a mannequin for her lover’s imagination, and that he cared no more for the realities of her being, for the things she felt and desired, for the passions and dreams that might move her, than a child cares for the sawdust in its doll.  She was the actress his whim had chosen to play a passive part....

It was one of the most educational disillusionments in Ann Veronica’s career.