Mrs. Leavitt had not noticed the physician go. She had not been listening for some time, the turn of her pattern had been at its most difficult point. But she had managed it, and now sat counting contentedly. Helen was gazing into the fire, her face all tender and tense. Bransby had watched the door close, a queer purse on his lips. Presently he said grimly—half in jest, half in earnest—

“Well, he’s a queer kind of a doctor. I shall have to consult some one else.”

Mrs. Leavitt rose with a startled cry. Glancing up from the endless pattern, at an easy stage now, the dust-searching eye had discovered much small prey. She gathered up her work carefully and bustled about the room.

“If that dreadful Barker didn’t forget to straighten out this room while we were at dinner. Dr. Latham and Mrs. Hilary will think I am the most careless housekeeper. I do hope, Helen, that you explain to our friends how the war has taken all our servants. You should tell everybody that before it began Barker was only a tweeny, and now she is all we have in the shape of a butler and parlor-maid and three-quarters of our staff. And she is so careless and clumsy.” She went from cushion to vase, from fireplace to table, straightening out the room somewhat to her satisfaction: the father and the daughter watching her with resigned amusement.

A book lay open, face down on the writing-table. She pounced on the volume. Bransby’s amusement vanished. “Careful there, Caroline, I am reading that book.”

“Not now, you’re not—and books belong in book-cases.” She closed it with a snap.

“Now you’ve lost my place!”

“Well, the book’s in its proper place,” she said, thrusting it into its shelf. “There, that’s better. Now I wonder how the drawing-room is. I must see. Dear me, this war has been a great inconvenience,” she sighed as she went from the room—taking Hugh, none too willing, with her.

Caroline Leavitt was not an unpatriotic woman. Simply, to her home and house were country and universe too—her horizon enclosed nothing beyond them. She loved England, because her home and her housekeeping, this house and her vocation, were in it; and not her home, as some do, because it was in England. England was a frame, a background. Her emotions began at Deep Dale’s front door, and ended in its kitchen garden. There are many such women in the world.

“Your aunt is a martinet, Helen,” Bransby grumbled smilingly. “She never lets me have my books about as I like them—and she is always losing my place.”

Helen laughed.

“Do you know,” her father continued, “I have found rare good sport in my books? Some of those chaps there—and Dickens especially—now—he was a card. Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Well, when I’m a bit low in my mind, I like to read it—more than any other book, I think—I find it sort of comforting. A man is never really lonely when he has books about him. Ah! I remember my place now—where Copperfield passes the blind beggar. It goes—let me see—yes: ‘He made me start by muttering as if he were an echo of the morning—“Blind—blind—blind.”’”

“I’m glad you find your books good company, Daddy.”

“Are you? Why?”

“Well—well—if—if we were ever parted, it would make me happy to think you had friends near you.”

Bransby laid his paper-weight down quickly and looked at his girl anxiously. “If we were ever parted? What do you mean, Helen?”

She turned from him a little as she replied softly, “Haven’t you—haven’t you ever looked forward to a time when we might be?”

“No—of course not!”

“Sure?” she whispered.

“Oh!”—her father’s breath came quickly—“You mean that some day you might marry?”

“Well—you want me to marry—some day—don’t you, Daddy?”

“Why—why, yes. Yes, of course I do. It would be a wrench, a bad wrench, but—I should feel safer, if I knew there was some good man to take care of you.”

The girl came to him then, and he reached and took her hand and held it to his cheek.

“There is a good man who wants to—now.” She spoke very low—only just said it. But Richard Bransby heard every word; and every word cut him.

“Who is he?” There was fear in his voice and fear on his face. He dropped her hand.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Not—not Hugh?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

He turned and walked as if groping his way towards the window.

Helen watched him, surprised and disappointed. “Why—why—Daddy!”

“Helen,” he said, still turned from her, “suppose—suppose I didn’t approve of your marrying Hugh—what would you do?”

The girl pouted a little. “Daddy dear,” she rebuked him, “do be serious.”

“I am serious.” He turned and faced her, sadly and gravely, far the more troubled of the two.

And she took a step towards him, and spoke clearly. “But why suppose such a thing? You would never refuse your consent to my marrying Hugh. You have loved him better than any one else in the world—except me—always since they came. Why, it has been almost as if he were your very own son.”

Her words affected him keenly. It was with a stern effort that he kept traces of his emotion from his voice. “But, if I didn’t approve?” he insisted.

Helen looked at him with startled eyes, realizing for the first time that he was serious. “You mean—you mean—you don’t!”

“Yes,” he told her.

“Why?” she cried.

The question was very, very difficult for him, so difficult that for a moment he could find no answer. At last he said slowly, “I don’t believe Hugh is the man to make you happy.”

“Don’t you think I am the best judge of that?” Helen said gently—quickly.

His answer was quicker: “No.”

The girl lost something of her self-control then, and there was a pitiful note in the young voice saying: “Daddy, this isn’t all a silly joke? You aren’t trying to tease me?”

“I’m not joking, Helen.” There were tears in his voice.

“Then,” she cried, “why have you suddenly changed towards Hugh? Our house has always been his home—all these years. I can only just remember when he came: I can’t remember when he was not here. You have purposely thrown us together.” There was accusation in her tone, but no anger.

She had pricked him, and he answered sharply: “I never said that it was my wish that you should marry him.”

“Not in words—no—but in a hundred other ways. Why have you changed? Why?”

“I don’t want to answer that question.”

“I have the right to know.”

Richard Bransby was suffering terribly—and physically too. He yearned over her, and he ached to get it over and done. But he could not bring himself to denounce the boy he had loved so—so loved still.

But Helen, at bay too, would give him no respite: how could she? “You haven’t answered me—yet,” she said, more coldly. Her tone was still gentle; but her fixed determination was quite evident—unmistakable.

“Very well, then, I will,” and he gathered himself for the ordeal, his—and hers. Then again he hesitated. “Helen,” he pleaded, “won’t you accept my decision? You—you know a little—just a little—what you are to me—how all the world—ah! my Helen—you wouldn’t break my old heart, would you? Say that you could not—would not—say it——”

“Daddy! My daddy,” she whispered.

“Say it,” he cried.

“Daddy,” her tears had come now—near; but she held them—“I mean to marry Hugh,” she said very quietly—even in his distressed agitation he recognized and honored her grit—the wonderful grit of such delicate creatures—“with your approval, I hope—but, in any case, I mean to marry him.”

“Think how I’ve loved you, child,” the father cried, catching her wrists in his hands, “you wouldn’t set my wishes aside?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Helen.” It was a sob in his throat.

“Just think for a moment,” she said, “he has given up everything to join the army. Any day, now, he may go—out there. He loves me, Daddy—and I love him.”

“He is not worthy of you—” Bransby was commanding himself—at what cost only he knew—and Horace Latham might partly have guessed.

After a pause—painful to him—she was too indignant to suffer much now—at last she spoke—sternly. “Why do you say that?”

“Don’t press the question,” he pleaded, “you know how much I care for you—how dear you are to me. Surely you must know that I would not come between you and your happiness if I hadn’t a good reason.”

“But I must know that reason.”

“You won’t give him up—for me?”

Pity for his evident distress welled over her, and she answered him tenderly: “I can’t, dear.”

She waited. He waited too. He could count his heart thump, and almost she might have counted it too.

At last he nerved himself desperately, went to his desk and pulled the ledger from the drawer. He put it down ready to his hand, if he had to show it to her at last; then turned and laid his hands on her shoulders.

When he could command himself—it was not at once—he said, speaking more gently than in all his long, gentle loving of her he had ever spoken to her before, “Helen, Hugh is a thief.”

There was silence between them; a silence neither could ever forget. It punctuated their mutual life.

She broke it. For a while she stood rigid and dazed—and then she laughed.

No lash in his face—even from her hand—could have hurt him so.

Again she waited: haughty and outraged now.

“He has stolen ten thousand pounds from me.”

She neither spoke nor stirred.

“That is why Grant came here last night—to tell me.”

The girl made a gesture of infinite scorn, of unspeakable rebuke.

“My dear, I would have spared you this—if I could.”

She answered him then, contempt in her voice, no faintest shadow of fear in her brave young eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t believe it—at first. But the proof,”—he went to the desk and laid one hand sorrowfully on the big buff book—“well, it’s too strong to be denied. You shall see it yourself.”

“I will not look. I would not believe it if Hugh told me himself.” She turned quietly and left him, and he dared not stay her.

But he heard her sob as she passed along the hall.

At the sound his white face quivered and he crouched down in a chair and laid his tired face on the table. He sat so for a long time—perfectly still. Presently a wet bead of something salt lay in the heart of the rose lotus flower.