I crossed the room to the side of her chair and threw myself down upon my knees, with my head in her lap. She passed her arms around me, and I had no need to say a single word. She understood. I think as I walked down the little main street of Eastminster that sunny morning I knew that the crisis in these strange events was fast drawing near. The calm of the last few days had been too complete. Almost I could have persuaded myself that the events of the last month or two had been a dream. No one could possibly have imagined that the thunderclouds of tragedy were hovering over that old-fashioned, almost cloistral, dwelling house lying in the very shadows of the cathedral. My father was, beyond a doubt, perfectly at his ease, calm and dignified, and wearing his new honors with a wonderful grace and dignity. Alice was perfectly happy in the new atmosphere of a cathedral town. To all appearance they were a model father and daughter, settling down for a very happy and uneventful life. But to me there was something unnatural alike in my father’s apparent freedom from all anxiety and in Alice’s complacent ignorance. I could not breathe freely in the room whilst they talked with interest about their new surroundings and the increased possibilities of their new life. But what troubled me most perhaps was that my father absolutely declined to discuss with me anything connected with the past. On every occasion when I sought to lead up to it he had at once checked me peremptorily. Nor would he suffer me to allude in any way to my new life. Once, when I opened my lips to frame some suggestive sentence, I caught a light in his eyes before which I was dumb. Gradually I began to realize what it meant. By leaving him for my mother, I had virtually declared myself on her side. All that I had been before went for nothing. In his eyes I was no longer his daughter. Whatever fears he had he kept them from me. I should no longer have even those tragic glimpses into his inner life. My anxieties, indeed, were to be lessened as my knowledge was to be less. Yet that was a thought which brought me little consolation. I felt as though I had deserted a brave man. I had come for a walk to escape from it, and at the end of the little line of shops issuing from the broad archway of the old-fashioned hotel I came face to face with Bruce Deville. He was carefully, even immaculately, dressed in riding clothes, and he was carrying himself with a new ease and dignity. Directly he saw me he stopped short and held out his hand. “What fortune!” he exclaimed, forgetting for the moment, or appearing to forget, to release my hand. “I heard that you were down, and I was going to call. It is much pleasanter to meet you though!” I was miserably and unaccountably nervous. Our old relative positions seemed suddenly to have become reversed. “We will go back, then,” I said; “it is only a moment’s walk to the close.” He laid his hand upon the sleeve of my jacket and checked me.