exult. At any rate, he
was prodigiously tickled--by the whole position.

A step, a rustle outside--he hastily shut his book and listened.

The door opened, and Marcella came in--a white vision against the heavy
blue of the walls. With her came, too, a sudden strong scent of flowers,
for she carried a marvellous bunch of hot-house roses, Aldous's gift,
which had just arrived by special messenger.

Wharton sprang up and placed a chair for her.

"I had begun to believe the ball only existed in my own imagination!"
he said gaily. "Surely you are very late."

Then he saw that she looked disturbed.

"It was papa," she said, coming to the fire, and looking down into it.
"It has been another attack of pain--not serious, mamma says; she is
coming down directly. But I wonder why they come, and why he thinks
himself so ill--do you know?" she added abruptly, turning to her
companion.

Wharton hesitated, taken by surprise. During the past weeks, what with
Mr. Boyce's confidence and his own acuteness, he had arrived at a very
shrewd notion of what was wrong with his host. But he was not going to
enlighten the daughter.

"I should say your father wants a great deal of care--and is nervous
about himself," he said quietly. "But he will get the care--and your
mother knows the whole state of the case."

"Yes, she knows," said Marcella. "I wish I did."

And a sudden painful expression--of moral worry, remorse--passed across
the girl's face. Wharton knew that she had often been impatient of late
with her father, and incredulous of his complaints. He thought he
understood.

"One can often be of more use to a sick person if one is not too well
acquainted with what ails them," he said. "Hope and cheerfulness are
everything in a case like your father's. He will do well."

"If he does he won't owe any of it--"

She stopped as impulsively as she had begun. "To me," she meant to have
said; then had retreated hastily, before her own sense of something
unduly intimate and personal. Wharton stood quietly beside her, saying
nothing, but receiving and soothing her self-reproach just as surely as
though she had put it into words.

"You are crushing your flowers, I think," he said suddenly.

And indeed her roses were dangling against her dress, as if she had
forgotten all about them.

She raised them carelessly, but he bent to smell them, and she held them
out.

"Summer!" he said, plunging his face into them with a long breath of