of collaboration?"

The question required an answer, and Phil shrank from answering.
Closeted with her mother she was reluctant to confess how close had been
the relationship between her father and Nan Bartlett. Her mind worked
quickly. She was outspokenly truthful by habit; but she was a loyal
soul, too. She decided that she could answer her mother's question
without violating her father's confidence as to his feelings toward Nan.
That was all over now; her father had told her so in a word. Lois
hummed, picking bits of lint from her skirt while Phil deliberated.

"Father did help with it. I suppose he even wrote part of it, but nobody
need know that. Daddy doesn't mean to go in for writing; he says the
very suspicion that he's literary would hurt him in the law."

"I suppose he helped on the book just to get Nan interested. Now that
she's launched as a writer, he drops out of the combination."

"Something like that. Daddy is very busy, you know."

Phil entertained views of her own as to the cause of her father's sudden
awakening. She was sure that his interest in Nan was the inspiration of
it, quite as much as alarm at the low ebb of his fortunes. In the
general confusion into which the world had been plunged, Phil groped in
the dark along unfamiliar walls. It was a grim fate that flung her back
and forth between father and mother, a shuttle playing across the
broken, tangled threads of their lives. She started suddenly as a new
thought struck her. Perhaps behind this seemingly inadvertent
questioning lay some deeper interest. Suddenly the rose light of romance
touched the situation. Phil looked at Lois guardedly. What if--? With an
accession of feeling she flung herself at her mother's knees and took
her hands.

"Could you and daddy ever make it up? Could you do that now, after all
these years?" she asked earnestly.

Lois looked at her absently, with her trick of trying to recall a
question not fully comprehended.

"Oh, _that_! Never in this world! What do you think your father's made
of?" Again the shrug, so becoming, so expressive, so final! She freed
her hands, and drew out and replaced a hairpin. For an instant Phil was
dismayed, but once so far afield in dangerous territory she would not
retreat.

"But what would you say?" she persisted.

"Dear Phil, don't think of such a terrible thing; it fairly chills me.
Your father is a gentleman; he wouldn't--he wouldn't do anything so
cruel as that!" she said a