All the same, she knew that she must one day do it and chance the
consequences. Things couldn't go on as they were.

And even granting that the outcome of any effort at self-assertion must be
unhappy, she grew impatient.

Meanwhile, she did nothing, she sat quietly on her perch, looked with stony
composure over the heads of the multitude, indifferent alike to admiration
and the uncharitable esteem of her own sex, and waited with a burning
heart.

Mr. Karslake ran true to form. He drifted in and out casually, always idle
and dégagé and elegant, he continued his irregular conferences with
ill-assorted companions, he worshipped discreetly and evidently without the
faintest hope, he seemed more than ever a trifling and immaterial creature.
Chance did not again lead him to the table where he had sat with the man
whom Sofia could not forget, and only the memory of that conversation held
any place for Karslake in the consideration of the girl.

Even at that she didn't consider him seriously, she looked for him and
missed him when he didn't appear solely because of a secret hope that some
day that other one would come back to meet him in the café.

Why she held fast to that hope Sofia could not have said.

Toward the middle of summer Mr. Karslake absented himself for several
weeks, and when he showed up again his visits were fewer and more widely
spaced.

On an afternoon late in August, a hot and weary day, he sauntered in with