Vee!'
and put his face between his hands and sat still for a long time before
he broke out again."

Ann Veronica had remained standing while her aunt spoke.

"Do you mean, aunt," she asked, "that my father thought I had gone
off--with some man?"

"What else COULD he think? Would any one DREAM you would be so mad as to
go off alone?"

"After--after what had happened the night before?"

"Oh, why raise up old scores? If you could see him this morning, his
poor face as white as a sheet and all cut about with shaving! He was
for coming up by the very first train and looking for you, but I said to
him, 'Wait for the letters,' and there, sure enough, was yours. He could
hardly open the envelope, he trembled so. Then he threw the letter at
me. 'Go and fetch her home,' he said; 'it isn't what we thought! It's
just a practical joke of hers.' And with that he went off to the City,
stern and silent, leaving his bacon on his plate--a great slice of bacon
hardly touched. No breakfast, he's had no dinner, hardly a mouthful of
soup--since yesterday at tea."

She stopped. Aunt and niece regarded each other silently.

"You must come home to him at once," said Miss Stanley.

Ann Veronica looked down at her fingers on the claret-colored
table-cloth. Her aunt had summoned up an altogether too vivid picture
of her father as the masterful man, overbearing, emphatic, sentimental,
noisy, aimless. Why on earth couldn't he leave her to grow in her own
way? Her pride rose at the bare thought of return.

"I don't think I CAN do that," she said. She looked up and said, a
little breathlessly, "I'm sorry, aunt, but I don't think I can."

Part 2

Then it was the expostulations really began.

From first to last, on this occasion, her aunt expostulated for about
two hours. "But, my dear," she began, "it is Impossible! It is quite out
of the Question. You simply can't." And to that, through vast rhetorical
meanderings, she clung. It reached her only slowly that Ann Veronica was
standing to her resolution. "How will you live?" she appealed. "Think
of what people will say!" That became a refrain. "Think of what Lady
Palsworthy will say! Think of what"--So-and-so--"will say! What are we
to tell people?

"Besides, what am I to tell your father?"

At first it had not been at all clear to Ann Veronica that she would
refuse to return home; she had had some dream of a capitulation that
should leave her an enlarged and defined freedom, but a