Mr. Sturgiss ended and drew back and looked at her. He lit a cigarette and took a sip at his coffee. “We thought of offering you three--” he set down his cup and looked at her again--“four hundred a year.” She declined the post. She was girlish, and delighted him, in her expression of her enormous sense of the compliment he paid her; she was a woman of uncommon purposefulness, and increased his admiration for her by the directness and decision with which uncompromisingly she said him no. She owed a loyalty which she could never fully pay to Simcox’s, to Mr. Simcox; that was the beginning and the end of her refusal. Simcox’s was her own, her idea, her child that daily she saw growing and that daily absorbed her more: that was the material that filled in and stiffened out the joints of her refusal. “But if you knew how proud I am, Mr. Sturgiss! You don’t mind my refusing?” He laughed and rose to take her to the drawing-room. “I don’t mind a bit. This is only what they call preliminary overtures. I shall ask you again. We mean to have you.” Between the two rooms he said, “Yes, mean to. It’s a big thing. I’m certain of it. We shall keep it open for you. We shan’t fill it.” He put his hand on the drawing-room door and opened it. “We can’t.” She went in radiant. She was on the red bus again, going home. She had stayed but the briefest time after dinner. She was too elevated, too buoyant, too possessed possibly to remain in company; excitedly desirous to be alone with her excited thoughts,--especially to be alone with them in that significant apartment of hers. Significant! Why upon the very day of entering it had come this most triumphant sign of its significance! Significant!... She had a front seat on the outside of the omnibus. She gazed before her along a path of night that the lamps jewelled in chains of gold, and streamed along it her tumultuous thoughts, terrible as an army with banners. It was very strange, and it vexed her, robbing her of her proud consciousness of them, that there obtruded among them, as one plucking at her skirt--as captain of them she rode before them--the figure of Laetitia’s Harry. Similarly he had obtruded and been like to spoil the pleasure of her visit; but he had been made to provide compensations and he obtruded now only in rebirth of a passage with him that, rehearsed again, much pleased her even while, annoyed, she cut him down. Taking her leave, she had been seen from the threshold by Mr. Sturgiss and by Laetitia’s Harry. It was pitchy dark, emerging from the brightness of the interior, and he had stepped with her to conduct her to the gate. “It was an extraordinary coincidence, meeting you here,” he had said.