Dennis was there to witness Miss St John’s return to the little room, getting up to bow ceremoniously, and saying, ‘Miss St John, I presume? Why, you are quite a stranger. May I have the pleasure of dusting your chair?’110

The taunting manner was just as usual, but he stared at her as though she had suddenly taken on a meaning for him.

‘And where have you been all this long while?’ he continued. ‘What wonderful weather we are having, are we not? It really seems quite a pity to come indoors.’

It was plain enough that he knew she had been sitting tealess in the Borough Gardens. Keeping up his pretence that her return to the little room was a return from an authentic absence, he expatiated on the benefits of a little change. He, too, had been away for a few days, seeing life. Enduring his mockery, and telling herself that it was nothing new and no more than she expected, she was presently driven to entertain a most fantastic surmise: that Dennis was glad to see her.

She was too much bewildered by the notion of such a development to speculate whether it would make things better or worse. His loquacity saved her from having to answer him, that, at any rate, was so much gained. She bundled away her impression of having been welcome, and hoped he might not be there next day. He was there. When she entered, his expression was so savage and morose that she hastened to sit down with her back to him, opening the book she was too nervous to read. On his return from Switzerland Canon Edgeworth took up once more the project of furthering the establishment of an organisation designed to promote the welfare of those engaged in the boot and shoe trade … The words were still dancing about the page when Dennis began to talk. Again she received this extraordinary impression that during her exile in the Borough Gardens their 111relationship had changed. His familiarity, which had been as formalized as an obscene gesture, assumed an almost boyish quality of gush and self-commendation; it was as if he were sitting up to beg for a lump of sugar off her tea-tray; and when he resorted to his threadbare jest of imploring her not to choke herself, he grew quite sentimental as he recalled their first encounter, when, as he said, she might have died if he had not intervened. Resigned to this new variety of persecution, she drank and munched, munched and drank, giving more attention to the recovered solace of her afternoon tea than to his rigmaroles.

Though she had lost any real hope of her advertisement at the stationer’s, she continued to call there once a week. Doing so gave a regularity to her days, and replaced the Friday visit to the cinema. One afternoon, interrupting her usual, ‘I have called to inquire,’ the stationer handed her a card, saying that it had been left five days before, and that it was a pity she had not called sooner.