He would be late--he would be very late; that was the one certainty that seemed to look her in the face.

There was still also the possibility that if he drove with Charlotte straight to Eaton Square he might think it best to remain there even on learning she had come away.

She had left no message for him on any such chance; this was another of her small shades of decision, though the effect of it might be to keep him still longer absent.

He might suppose she would already have dined; he might stay, with all he would have to tell, just on purpose to be nice to her father.

She had known him to stretch the point, to these beautiful ends, far beyond that; he had more than once stretched it to the sacrifice of the opportunity of dressing.
If she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice, and had made herself, during the time at her disposal, quite inordinately fresh and quite positively smart, this had probably added, while she waited and waited, to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the image of her having crouched.