Even Mrs. Grundy herself couldn’t object to a journalist dining with a politician! They both laughed. “He’s a good lad,” said her father.!

The doctor had been whispering to one of the bearers. He had the face of an old man, but his shoulders were broad and he looked sturdy. He nodded, and beckoned Joan to follow him up the slippery steps. “I expect that was it,” Joan confessed. “It interferes with our reason at times.”

“I’m not indifferent to it,” answered Joan. “I’m reckoning on it to help me.” “I am only at the end of a journey when you need me,” he had answered, and they had kissed. And next morning she returned to her own life. Hilda! Why had she never thought of it? The whole thing was so obvious. “You ought not to think about yourself. You ought to think only of him and of his work. Nothing else matters.” If she could say that to Joan, what might she not have said to her mother who, so clearly, she divined to be the incubus—the drag upon her father’s career? She could hear the child’s dry, passionate tones—could see Mrs. Phillips’s flabby cheeks grow white—the frightened, staring eyes. Where her father was concerned the child had neither conscience nor compassion. She had waited her time. It was a few days after Hilda’s return to school that Mrs. Phillips had been first taken ill.