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He was there. He had changed his car as well as his clothes. He did not look poor. He looked as if he owned that car and a good deal of the rest of the earth.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I thought this open car might be useful. If you would be kind enough to take the seat beside me we could talk as we go. I thought, as it was such a ripping morning, you might like to drive into the country somewhere for lunch. But that must be just as you like, of course.”

“It is exactly what I like. Let’s see. We’ve got lots of time before lunch. You shall choose where we go.”

“If you don’t mind lunching a little late, we might do Brighton.”

“Yes, we lunch at Brighton,” she said decisively. The spirit of adventure was hot within her. She had meant the day to be rather exciting. It was more than fulfilling expectations.

As they crawled through the traffic she asked him how he had persuaded his firm to let her have the open car instead of the other. She was told that it was the policy of his people to oblige a customer in every possible way, and that they had made no trouble. Then she spoke of things she had seen at the National Gallery, and found him just as enthusiastic about art as she had done once in the old days at the school, when chance gave them a few minutes’ talk together. But it was not till they sat at lunch in a good little hotel overlooking the sea that they became confidential.

“I gather,” he said, “that you knew that Mrs Dewlop sacked me.”

“She told all of us.”

“Did she say why?”

“Not exactly. She said that you were a satyr. I–I didn’t believe that.”

“Well, I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I kissed Dora Stenson.”

This was a blow. “I don’t think I want to hear about it,” said Myra coldly.

“It’s all very well,” said Davenant mournfully, “but I’d had very little experience as a teacher. What do you do yourself when a girl begins to cry?”

“If she’s quite a child, I try to comfort her. If it’s one of the older girls, I tell her that I dislike hysteria, and that she had better go away until she has recovered. But it rarely happens with the older girls. What made Dora Stenson cry?”

“All my own fault–the whole thing. You know the beauties I had to teach. Dora was the only one that had any gift. As for the rest, you might as well have tried to teach blind pigs to draw. What was the consequence? I gave Dora most of the teaching, and I was harder on her than I was on the others. I judged her by a different standard, and I drove her as hard as I could. Well, one day, at the end of the hour, she brought me up some bad work. She’d taken no trouble. It was rotten. All the same, if any of the others had shown me anything nearly as good, I should have been more than satisfied. As it was Dora, I lost my wool and told her what I thought. Classes were dismissed. You went out. I was left alone in the room. Back came Dora to pick up some truck she’d left behind, and she was crying–crying like anything. Well, I couldn’t stand it. I’d never meant to be a brute, and there was that girl–very pretty she is, too–crying like anything. I began to talk to her, and, before I knew where I was, I had kissed her. I’m making a clean breast of the whole thing–I kissed her two or three times.”

Miss Myra Larose, who had not wanted to hear about it, had listened with breathless interest, and now put in a shrewd question.

“And did Dora kiss you?”

“As I was saying, where I was wrong was in–“