se she intuitively shared my sympathy for her father,
Anne turned to me just before she spoke, with a quick little, impatient
gesture as if beseeching me not to interfere. I submitted myself to her
wish with a distinct feeling of pleasure, but made no application of my
own joy in serving her to the case of her father.

He was speaking again, now, with a solemn perplexity, as if he were
confusedly challenging the soft opposition of his women's influence.

"But, of course, she must go back to the Hall," he said. "You wouldn't
like to get us into trouble, would you, Miss Brenda? You see," he pushed
his chair back once more, in the throes of his effort to explain himself,
"your father would turn me out, if there was any fuss."

He was going on, but his wife, with a sudden magnificent violence,
scattered the web she and her daughter had been weaving.

"And that might be the best thing that could happen to us, Alfred," she
said. "Oh! I'm so sick and tired of these foolish Jervaises. They are like
the green fly on the rose trees. They stick there and do nothing but suck
the life out of us. You are a free man. You owe them nothing. Let us break
with them and go out, all of us, to Canada with Arthur and Brenda. As for
me, I would rejoice to go."

"Nancy! Nancy!" he reproached her for the third time, with a humouring
shake of his head. They were past the celebration of their silver wedding,
but it was evident that he still saw in her the adorable foolishness of
one who would never be able to appreciate the final infallibility of
English standards. He loved her, he would make immense personal sacrifices
for her, but in these matters she was still a child, a foreigner. Just so
might he have reproached Anne at three years old for some infantile
naughtiness.

"It may come to that," Arthur interjected, gloomily.

"You're talking like a fool, Arthur," his father said. "What'd I do at my
age--I'll be sixty-one next month--trapesing off to Canada?" He felt on
safer ground, more sure of his authority in addressing his son. He was
English. He might be rebellious and need chastisement, but he would not be
swayed by these whimsical notions that sometimes bewitched his mother and
sister.

"But, father, we may _have_ to go," Anne softly reminded him.

"Have to? Have to?" he repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding
in his voice. "He hasn't been doing anything foolish, has he? Nothing as
can't be got over?"

It was his wife