ght to have known better and I shall be so
unhappy if you mind. Won't you try not to?"

As she spoke, he stood up and she thought that the delayed volcano of
his wrath was about to burst. To smother it, she touched him. "Of course
you will mind. But I would not have been such a fool if I had not
believed that everything would be so much nicer for you. Can't you see
that and, if you do, can't you forgive me?"

He had moved from her to the piano; there he turned and looked. "There
is nothing to forgive, Cassy. You have been a good girl always. I am
sorry, of course I am sorry, but you are not to blame."

Understanding instead of maledictions! Sympathy in lieu of abuse! Such
things are affecting. The tears swam to her eyes and wretchedly and yet
thankfully she wept.

He did not seem to notice. In the narrow space he was moving about,
shifting things on the piano, displacing and replacing a score, which,
finally, he let fall. He stooped for it. As he raised it, Cassy saw
through her tears that his hand was shaking. He, too, may have seen it.
He left the room and she heard him pottering in the kitchen.

She wiped her eyes. Across the court was another kitchen in which were a
woman and a child. Often she had seen them there, but if she had seen
them elsewhere she would not have recognised them. They were but forms,
the perceptions of a perceiver, and though Cassy had never read Fichte
and was unacquainted with Berkeley, the idea visited her that they had
no real existence, that, it might be, she had none either, that all she
had endured was a dream drifting by, with nothing past which to drift.

It was her father's attitude that had induced these metaphysical
hysterics. She had expected that some demon within him would spring out
and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she
was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The
tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people
across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, she
included herself.

But now at least her father was actual. He was coming in with glasses
and a bottle which he put on the table.

"You are tired," he said. "Have a little."

Seating himself, he drank and Cassy feared that if the liquor exerted
the authority that liquor has, he might go back into it and exact from
her details which it would revolt her to supply. In helping himself, he
had poured a glass for her. S