it very plain. I am not going to let my husband put
through all the danger and get through all the trouble, and then come
home for me that I may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If
that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some
other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking
irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, '"but this girl
won't!"'

'But you see, Helena,' Sir Rupert said almost peevishly, 'you don't seem
to have thought of things. I don't want to be a wet blanket, or a
prophet of evil omen, or any of that sort of thing; but there may be
accidents, you know, and miscalculations, and failures even, and things
may go wrong with this enterprise, no matter how well planned.'

'Yes, I have thought of all that. That is exactly where it is, dear.'

'Where what is, Helena?'

'Dear, where my purpose comes in. If there is going to be a failure, if
there is going to be a danger to the man I love--well, I mean to be in
it too. If he fails, it will cost his life; if it costs his life, I want
it to cost my life too.'

'You might have thought a little of _me_, Helena,' her father said
reproachfully. 'You might have remembered that I have no one but you.'

Helena burst into tears.

'Oh, my father, I did think of you--I do think of you always; but this
crisis is beyond me and above us both. I have thought it out, and I
cannot do anything else than what I am prepared to do. I have thought it
over night after night, again and again--I have prayed for guidance--and
I see no other way! You know,' and a smile began to show itself through
her tears, 'long before I knew that he loved me I was always thinking
what I ought to do, supposing he _did_ love me! And then, papa dear, if
I were to remain at home, and to marry a marquis, or an alderman, or a
man from Chicago, I might get diphtheria and die, and who would be the
better for _that_--except, perhaps, the marquis, or the alderman, or the
man from Chicago?'

'Look here, Sir Rupert,' the Dictator said, 'let me tell you that at
first I was not inclined to listen to this pleading of your daughter. I
thought she did not understand the sacrifice she was making. But she has
conquered me--she has shown me that she is in earnest--and I have caught
the inspiration of her spirit and her generous self-sacrifice, and I
have not the heart to resist her--I dare not refuse her. She shall come,
in God's name!'

*