them weeks before in the Temple
Courts had never quite disappeared. His face was worn
and thin, its delicacy had sharpened, and he carried
about with him an habitual abstraction. Janet, regarding
him day after day in the light of her secret knowledge,
gave herself up to an inward storm of anger and grief
and anxiety. Elfrida's name had been tacitly dropped
between them, but to Janet's sensitiveness she was
constantly and painfully to be reckoned with in their
common life. Lawrence Cardiff's moods were accountable
to his daughter obviously by Elfrida's influence. She
noted bitterly that his old evenness of temper, the gay
placidity that made so delightful a basis for their joint
happiness, had absolutely disappeared. Instead, she found
her father either irritable or despondent, or inspired
by a gaiety which she had no hand in producing, and which
took no account of her. That was the real pain. Janet
was keenly distressed at the little drama of suffering
that unfolded itself daily before her, but her disapproval
of its cause very much blunted her sense of its seriousness.
She had, besides, a grown-up daughter's repulsion and
impatience for a parental love-affair, and it is doubtful
whether she would have brought her father's to a happy
conclusion without a very severe struggle if she had
possessed the power to do it. But this exclusion gave
her a keener pang; she had shared so much with him before,
had been so important to him always. And now he could
propose, with perfect equanimity that she should go to
America with the Halifaxes.

"But you could not get away by the twenty-first," she
returned, trying to take it for granted that the idea
included him.

"Oh, I don't propose going," Mr. Cardiff returned from
behind his newspaper.

"But, daddy, they intend to be away for a year."

"About that. Lady Halifax has arranged a capital itinerary.
They mean to come back by India."

"And pray what would become of you all by yourself for
a year, sir?" asked Janet brightly. "Besides, we were
always going to do that trip together." She had a stubborn
inward determination not to recognize this difference
that had sprung up between them. It was only a phase,
she told herself, of her father's miserable feeling just
now; it would last another week, another fortnight, and
then things would be as they had been before. She would
not let herself believe in it, hurt as it might.

Mr. Cardiff lowered his paper. "Don't think of th