Behind her drawn-down lids, she offered up a little prayer that she might always be worthy of his homage. She didn’t know it would make no difference to him. “I shall ask you to marry me when your hair is white,” he said. “May I?”!

“Why do you do it?” asked Miss Ensor. The blood was flowing back into her veins. “Oh, it wasn’t your fault,” she answered. “We must make the best we can of it.”

Joan went back by the early train. She met some people at the station that she knew and travelled up with them. That picture of Mrs. Phillips’s tongue just showing beyond the line of Mrs. Phillips’s cheek remained at the back of her mind; but it was not until she was alone in her own rooms that she dared let her thoughts return to it. “But they’re so slow at their lessons,” grumbled Joan. “One repeats it and repeats it; and then, when one feels that surely now at least one has drummed it into their heads, one finds they have forgotten all that one has ever said.” “No, that’s precisely what he isn’t,” answered Joan. “You feel that he belongs to no class, but his own. The class of the Abraham Lincolns, and the Dantons.”