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Throughout her interview with Mr. Ford, the gray-haired kindly solicitor to whom Holmes had sent her, Ann had managed to preserve what Ford would have called a “stiff upper lip.”

They discussed the case, and the steps she must take to defend the action. Then she rose to go. Her face was very white, and to Ford she suddenly appeared an extraordinarily pathetic little figure.

“It’s a damned shame,” he said, all at once losing his matter-of-fact, professional manner, and becoming entirely human. “Why, you’re only a kid. I wonder what I’d have felt like, if this had happened to my daughter Rhoda when she was your age.”

Ann’s “stiff upper lip” abruptly crumpled, and she burst into tears. And they were not quiet, ladylike and undisfiguring tears. She covered her twisted face with her handkerchief, and walked to the window so that the man behind her could not see the havoc he had wrought. She was sobbing like a child, and she was bitterly ashamed of the exhibition she was making of herself. Except for those few tears she had dropped on to the page of Vera’s letter, she had not cried until this moment. Well, she was making up for it now!