She read with a mixture of affection and resentment. She had been arriving at her own verdict on her efforts and adventures. Here was Dick Dennehy's! He thanked God that efforts and adventures were at an end, and that she was going to settle down quietly--in fact, to take care of herself, as he had put it that evening when he walked with her to the railway station. A very unjust verdict, thought Winnie, but then--she added, smiling--"It's only old Dick Dennehy's!" What else was to be expected from him--from him who liked her so much and disapproved of her 'goings-on' so strenuously? What about his own? How was he settling that question of his? Or how had he settled it? That problem which was 'not serious'! "Perhaps I shall see you"! Only 'perhaps'? Yet she was going to settle down at Nether End, and he was building his house there. The probabilities of an encounter between them seemed to warrant more than 'perhaps.' The atmosphere of the railway waiting-room, the look on his face, that shout, muffled by engine-snorts, about somebody being a fool--they all came back to her. "But I'm very busy"--meaning thereby--Winnie took leave to add the innuendo--"I shan't be able to see you often!" Irresistibly her lips curved into a smile. It looked as if the problem weren't quite settled yet! If it were finally settled either way, why should Dick be so busy, so entirely unable to give reasonable attention to his house, or--as Stephen had told her--to care a hang about it? "Oh, nonsense!" Winnie contrived to say to herself, though not with absolute conviction. "If it ever was that, he must have got over it by now, and I shall bury myself in the Synopsis." It was really rather soon to find herself pitted against another Institution! CHAPTER XXVIII THE VIEW FROM A HOUSE Winnie shut Dr. Westermarck on _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_ with a bang. "I'm not going to do any more at the Synopsis to-day," she announced. "It's much too fine. And what are you chuckling at, Stephen?" With the help of Liddell and Scott, and a crib, Stephen was digesting Aristophanes' skit on Socrates. "An awful old Tory, but it's dashed good stuff. On no account work if you don't want to, Winnie. This job's not to be done in a day, you know."