Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heart-broken, child's anguish, all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation.

Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin's landlady at the door.

`Good evening! Is Mr Birkin in? Can I see him?'

`Yes, he's in. He's in his study.'

Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.

`Hello!' he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child.

`Do I look a sight?' she said, shrinking.

`No -- why? Come in,' he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study.

There -- immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.

`What's the matter?' he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.

`What's the matter?' he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, like a child that cannot tell.

`What is it, then?' he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.

`Father hit me,' she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.

`What for?' he said.

She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.

`Why?' he repeated, in his strange, soft, penetrating voice.

She looked round at him, rather defiantly.

`Because I said I was going to be married tomorrow, and he bullied me.'

`Why did he bully you?'

Her mouth dropped again, she remembered the scene once more, the tears came up.

`Because I said he didn't care -- and he doesn't, it's only his domineeringness that's hurt --' she said, her mouth pulled awry by her weeping, all the time she spoke, so that he almost smiled, it seemed so childish. Yet it was not childish, it was a mortal conflict, a deep wound.

`It isn't quite true,' he said. `And even so, you shouldn't say it.'