It was past seven when she got back to her hotel.  She thought then that she had shaken off the man of the bulging blue eyes forever, but that night she found he followed her into her dreams.  He stalked her, he stared at her, he craved her, he sidled slinking and propitiatory and yet relentlessly toward her, until at last she awoke from the suffocating nightmare nearness of his approach, and lay awake in fear and horror listening to the unaccustomed sounds of the hotel.

She came very near that night to resolving that she would return to her home next morning.  But the morning brought courage again, and those first intimations of horror vanished completely from her mind.

Part 5

She had sent her father a telegram from the East Strand post-office worded thus: 

|   All   |    is     |   well   |   with   |   me    |
|---------|-----------|----------|----------|---------|
|   and   |   quite   |   safe   | Veronica |         |
-----------------------------------------------------

and afterward she had dined a la carte upon a cutlet, and had then set herself to write an answer to Mr. Manning’s proposal of marriage.  But she had found it very difficult.

“Dear Mr. Manning,” she had begun.  So far it had been plain sailing, and it had seemed fairly evident to go on:  “I find it very difficult to answer your letter.”

But after that neither ideas nor phrases had come and she had fallen thinking of the events of the day.  She had decided that she would spend the next morning answering advertisements in the papers that abounded in the writing-room; and so, after half an hour’s perusal of back numbers of the Sketch in the drawing-room, she had gone to bed.

She found next morning, when she came to this advertisement answering, that it was more difficult than she had supposed.  In the first place there were not so many suitable advertisements as she had expected.  She sat down by the paper-rack with a general feeling of resemblance to Vivie Warren, and looked through the Morning Post and Standard and Telegraph, and afterward the half-penny sheets.  The Morning Post was hungry for governesses and nursery governesses, but held out no other hopes; the Daily Telegraph that morning seemed eager only for skirt hands.  She went to a writing-desk and made some memoranda on a sheet of note-paper, and then remembered that she had no address as yet to which letters could be sent.

She decided to leave this matter until the morrow and devote the morning to settling up with Mr. Manning.  At the cost of quite a number of torn drafts she succeeded in evolving this: 

“Dear Mr. Manning,—­I find it very difficult to answer your letter.  I hope you won’t mind if I say first that I think it does me an extraordinary honor that you should think of any one like myself so highly and seriously, and, secondly, that I wish it had not been written.”