ief
to her father, for he had never betrayed a sign of it. On the contrary,
he had seemed to approve her decisions, and had even agreed with her in
preferring the mistletoe to the pitcher-plant. He welcomed her back to
Tory Hill, where her residences were longer, now that she ceased to be
much with Madame de Melcourt, and yet was always ready with money and
his consent when she had invitations from her friends abroad. On her
engagement to Rupert Ashley he expressed complete satisfaction, and said
in so many words that it was a more appropriate match for her than any
French alliance, however distinguished. His tenderness in this respect
came over her now as peculiarly touching, unsealing the fount of filial
pity at a moment when other motives might have made for indignation and
revolt.

He opened his eyes without giving any other sign of waking.

"Hallo! What are you looking at me for?"

The tone was not impatient, but she heard in it an implication of fear.

"Papa, are your troubles anything like Jack Berrington's?"

He gazed at her without moving a muscle or changing a shade. She only
fancied that in the long look with which he regarded her there was a
receding, sinking, dying light, as though the soul within him was
withdrawing.

"What makes you ask that?"

The intonation was expressionless, and yet, it seemed to her, a little
wary.

"I ask chiefly because--well, because I think they are."

He looked at her for a minute more, perhaps for longer.

"Well, then--you're right."

Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the
world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived.
When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of
a surging wreck.

"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was
settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."

"That's what I meant--exactly."

He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his
extinct cigar. She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside
his couch--a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with
multicolored flowerets.

"I suppose it's the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money
to?"

"And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown,
and--"

"Haven't they anything left?"

"Oh yes. It isn't all gone, by any means." Then he added, as if to make
a clean breast of the affair and be done