he thought very beautiful and
tender and absolutely irrelevant to Morningside Park--or work in peace
at his microtome without bothering about her in the least.

The immense disillusionment that awaited him! The devastating
disillusionment! She had a vague desire to run after him, to state her
case to him, to wring some understanding from him of what life was to
her. She felt a cheat and a sneak to his unsuspecting retreating back.

"But what can one do?" asked Ann Veronica.

Part 3

She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father
liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner was quite
uneventful. Her father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt
dropped fragments of her projects for managing while the cook had a
holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica went into the drawing-room with Miss
Stanley, and her father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive
petrography. Later in the evening she heard him whistling, poor man!

She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though she knew
that anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night. She took up one of her
father's novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own room for
some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the room that she was now
really abandoning forever, and returned at length with a stocking to
darn. Her aunt was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion
under the newly lit lamp.

Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and darned badly for a
minute or so. Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye
the careful arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose, the little drooping
lines of mouth and chin and cheek.

Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love, aunt?" she asked.

Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands that
had ceased to work. "What makes you ask such a question, Vee?" she said.

"I wondered."

Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear, for seven
years, and then he died."

Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur.

"He was in holy orders, and we were to have been married when he got a
living. He was a Wiltshire Edmondshaw, a very old family."

She sat very still.

Ann Veronica hesitated with a question that had leaped up in her mind,
and that she felt was cruel. "Are you sorry you waited, aunt?" she said.

Her aunt was a long time before she answered. "His stipend forbade it,"
she said, and see