Anna paid no heed to opinions or comments. She went about her business and managed it with instinctive skill. It sometimes puzzled poor Alec Turner to think why his presence was so often requested, when his arrival evoked so little enthusiasm. He did not realise the part he played in Anna's scheme, nor how his visits were to appear to Walter Blake. Anna's generalship had thought all this out. The exhibition of Alec was a subsidiary move in the great strategic conception of capturing Walter Blake on the rebound from Sibylla. But the pawn was not docile, and objected violently so soon as its function began to be apparent. Anna precipitated what she did not desire--a passionate avowal in which the theme of her own gifts and fascination was intermingled with the ideal of influencing the trend of public opinion from a modest home and on a modest income. She was told that she could be removed from the vanities of life and be her true, her highest self. When she showed no inclination to accept the path in life thus indicated, Alec passed through incredulity to anger. Had he cast his pearls before---- Well, at inappreciative feet? At this tone Anna became excusably huffy; to refuse a young man is not to deny all the higher moral obligations. Besides Alec annoyed her very much by assuming persistently that the dictates of her heart called her towards him, and that worldly considerations alone inspired her refusal. "Oh, you're silly!" she cried. "I tell you it's nothing of the sort." The dusk of the afternoon softened her features; the light of the fire threw up in clear outline the stylish well-gowned figure. Poor Alec, in his shabby mustard suit, stood opposite her, his hands in his pockets, in dogged misery and resentment, with all the helpless angry surprise of a first experience of this kind, fairly unable to understand how it was that love did not call forth love, obstinate in clinging to the theory of another reason as the sole explanation. Things did not exist in vain. For what was his love? "But--but what am I to do?" he stammered. Rather puzzled--after all rather flattered, Anna prayed him to be sensible and friendly. He consented to hope for her happiness, though he was obviously not sanguine about it. For himself all was over! So he said as he flung out of the room, knowing nothing of what lay before him on the path of life; discerning nothing of a certain daughter of a poor old political writer--a little round woman who made her own gowns, was at once very thrifty and very untidy, was inclined to think that the rulers of the earth should be forcibly exterminated, and lavished an unstinted affection on every being, human or brute, with which she was ever brought into contact. And if she did not greatly influence the trend of public opinion--well, anyhow she tried to. Just now, however, Alec knew nothing about her; he was left to think hopelessly of the trim figure and the lost ideals--the two things would mix themselves up in his mind.