'You mustn't bother poor Mrs. Trevalla with business now, must he, Miss Ryle? It must wait for another day. You were coming to Cadogan Square, weren't you? I'll take you with me.' He looked from one to the other. Never was man in a more hopeless corner. Nothing would have pleased him so much as to knock their heads together. Connie was imitating Peggy's external unconsciousness of anything remarkable in the situation as well as she could. 'We mustn't stay. Mrs. Trevalla must want you,' pursued Connie. 'Oh, I can leave her for just a few minutes,' Peggy assured her, with an anxious look at the clock. 'Good-bye, Miss Ryle,' said Connie, giving Peggy's hand a hearty squeeze. She passed on towards the door and opened it. Holding it ajar, she looked round and waited for Beaufort Chance. For an instant he stood where he was. The idea of rebellion was still in him. But his spirit failed. He came up to Peggy and sullenly bade her farewell. 'Good-bye,' said Peggy in a low voice. Its tone struck him as odd; when he looked in her eyes he saw a touch of compassion. It flashed across him that she understood what he was feeling, that she saw how his acts had brought him lower than his nature need have been brought--or at least that she was sorry that this fate, and nothing less than this, must be held to be justice. 'Good-bye, Miss Ryle. My regrets to Mrs. Trevalla. I hope for another opportunity. Now I'm ready, Miss Fricker, and most delighted to have the chance.' At all times let the proprieties be sacred! That is, let them be observed in the presence of third parties--especially if those parties have brought us to humiliation. They are not so exacting in a vehicle that holds only two. 'Your turn to-day; mine some other day, Connie,' said Beaufort Chance, as he sullenly settled himself in the cab. 'Oh, don't talk bosh, and don't sulk. You've found out that I'm not a fool. Is there any harm in that?' She turned to him briskly. 'There are just two ways of taking this,' she told him. 'One is to be bullied into it by papa. The other is to do it pleasantly. Since there's no way not to do it, which of those two do you think best?' 'Did you mean it all the time?' he asked, sullen still, but curious. 'As soon as I began to be really gone on you,' she answered him. The phrase is not classical, but she used it, and used it with a very clear purpose. 'You don't suppose I like being--being disagreeable, and seeming to have--to have to force you to what you'd always let me understand you wanted? A girl has some self-respect, Beaufort.' 'Some girls have got a deuced good set of brains, anyhow,' he said, feeling for her some of the admiration that her father's clear purposes and resolute pursuit of them always claimed for him. 'Do you suppose' (Connie's face looked out of the other side of the cab) 'that if I hadn't been awfully fond of you----?'