it.

"Is that Mary?" came from the other side of the door, whereupon Nessy
beat a retreat, and at the next moment I was in my father's room.

His massive and powerful head was propped up with pillows in the
camp-bed which was all he ever slept on, and he was looking so ill and
changed in so short a time that I was shocked, as well as ashamed at the
selfishness of having thought only of myself all the morning.

But he would listen to no sympathy, protesting there was little or
nothing the matter with him, that "Conrad was croaking about cancer,"
but the doctor was a fool.

"What about yourself, though?" he said. "Great doings at the Castle,
they're telling me."

I thought this a favourable opportunity to speak about my own affairs,
so I began on my story again, and though I found it harder to tell now
that my listener was my father, I struggled on and on, as well as I
could for the emotion that was choking me.

I thought he would pity me. I expected him to be angry. Although he was
showing me some of the contemptuous tenderness which he had always
assumed towards my mother, yet I was his daughter, and I felt sure that
he would want to leap out of bed that he might take my husband by the
throat and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat. But what happened was
something quite different.

Hardly had I begun when he burst out laughing.

"God bless my soul," he cried, "you're never going to lose your stomach
over a thing like that?"

I thought he had not understood me, so I tried to speak plainer.

"I see," he said. "Sweethearting some other woman, is he? Well, what of
it? He isn't the first husband who has done the like, and I guess he
won't be the last."

Still I thought I had not made myself clear, so I said my husband had
been untrue to me, that his infidelities under my own roof had degraded
me in my own eyes and everybody else's, that I could not bear to live
such a life any longer and consequently. . . .

"Consequently," said my father, "you come to me to fight your battles
for you. No, no, fight them yourself, gel. No father-in-law ought to
interfere."

It was a man's point of view I suppose, but I was ready to cry with
vexation and disappointment, and though I conquered the impulse to do
that I could go no farther.

"Who's the woman?" he asked.

I told him it was one of our house-party.

"Then cut her out. I guess you're clever enough to do it, whoever she
is. You've got the looks too, and I don't g