Constance stepped in after him with a proud freedom of step, the air of one who was mistress of herself and her fate. She went up to the table on which the tall lamp stood, her face on a level with it, fully lighted up by it. She held her hat in her hand, and played with it with a careless yet half-nervous gesture. Her fair hair was short, and clustered in her neck and about her forehead almost like a child’s, though she was not like a child. Mr Waring, looking at her, was more agitated than she. He trembled a little; his eyelids were lifted high over his eyes. Her air was a little defiant; but there was no suspicion, only a little uncertainty in his. He put out his hand to her after a minute’s inspection. “If you are Constance, you are welcome,” he said. “I don’t suppose that you have any doubt I am Constance,” said the girl, flinging her hat on the table and herself into a chair. “It is a very curious way to receive one, though, after such a long journey--such a tiresome long journey,” she repeated, with a voice into which a querulous tone of exhaustion had come. Mr Waring sat down too in the immediate centre of the light. He had not kissed her nor approached her, save by the momentary touch of their hands. It was a curious way to receive a stranger, a daughter. She lay back in her chair as if wearied out, and tears came to her eyes. “I should not have come, if I had known,” she said, with her lip quivering. “I am very tired. I put up with everything on the journey, thinking, when I came here---- And I am more a stranger here than anywhere!” She paused, choking with the half-hysterical fit of crying which she would not allow to overcome her. “She--knows nothing about me!” she cried, with a sharp accent of pain, as if this was the last blow.