He knew the thief, the grandchild of an old bedridden dame who lived some miles away on the edge of the moor. The old man stood long, watching the small cloaked figure till it was lost in the darkness. It was not till he lay upon his dying bed that he confessed it. But each evening, from that day, he would steal into the room and see to it himself that the window was left ajar. They returned home by train. Joan insisted on travelling third class, and selected a compartment containing a stout woman and two children. Arthur had to be at the works. An important contract had got behindhand and they were working overtime. She and her father dined alone. He made her fulfil her promise to talk about herself, and she told him all she thought would interest him. She passed lightly over her acquaintanceship with Phillips. He would regard it as highly undesirable, she told herself, and it would trouble him. He was reading her articles in the Sunday Post, as also her Letters from Clorinda: and of the two preferred the latter as being less subversive of law and order. Also he did not like seeing her photograph each week, displayed across two columns with her name beneath in one inch type. He supposed he was old-fashioned. She was getting rather tired of it herself.!

“It told me to do it,” answered the girl. 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.

She did not want to talk about the war. “Go away. I’se looking at myself,” had explained Joan, struggling furiously to regain the glass. “I’m not so sure that it isn’t,” he laughed. “It’s the dinner-table that rules in England. We settle everything round a dinner-table.”