“Don’t you want to hear what it is?” “Er—yes; oh, yes,” reluctantly. “But I’m sorry I can’t ask you to sit down here; you see my friend is away——” “Oh! She’s _away_. I’m glad she’s well enough. I thought she was ill.” This I didn’t know how to meet. “Where may I speak to you, then?” he added. “Is it—about something very important?” “Important enough to bring me up to London by the midnight train after you’d left. I just had a bath and breakfast at an hotel and came on here. So—” Evidently there was no getting out of it. —“Will you come out and talk? If it’s not troubling you too much,” he added stonily. “Well, if you will wait until I put on my hat and coat,” I said slowly, “I will come out into Battersea Park with you. We can sit down there.” In a few minutes we were sitting side by side on a couple of green-backed wooden chairs on the path that faces the sluggish brown river and the barges that slid slowly between us and the tower of Old Chelsea Church. Why had he come? “Important,” he’d said. Was it a recall? Must I go back for the five remaining months of my year’s contract? I remembered, then, that it was in writing—I’d forgotten that! Must I return to Porth Cariad to serve the purpose of him and that girl? If he insisted, I must. I should be glad—(not, not to be with _him_ again! That passing feeling I should no doubt manage to kill. I _must_ kill it)—to be back with his mother and Blanche and Theo in that golden Anglesey, instead of in this baked and dusty park, rowdy with Board-school children on holiday. For the sake of the _place_ I could forget the man I was with; I could ignore that morning when we painted the figure-head! Thank heaven I was feeling so like “a wooden woman” myself. For another moment I was kept waiting, wondering what he would say. Three words told me everything. They swept aside so many things that up to then had seemed real and undeniable enough. They did away with hours in a music-room, of another hour in the dusk under a copper-beech, when overtures were made of a friendship that seemed as if it were going to work all right, (“_You could be such a little brick to me!_”) but had broken down because, after all, he was a man and I a girl—even though I didn’t happen to be the right girl.... Those weeks of gay, open-air comradeship in Wales, that morning of sunshine and hotly-snatched kisses on a cliff among the gorse, that afternoon of a race and a struggle for life in the jade-green waters of a bay.... All these were to be as though they’d never been. It was all over in those three words: “Now, Miss Trant!” The unexpected sex? Oh, no! It’s we who can be trusted to do just what’s expected of _us_ by our nearest man: to be heroic, petty, clinging or capable. He meant me to be utterly business-like and formal. Well, he found me so, my tone just matching his own. “Now, Miss Trant!” “Yes, Mr. Waters?” “It’s about this nominal engagement of ours. That was to go on for a year, I think.” “Yes.”