or I shall ask Ruth."

"Well," he said, but this time without rancour, merely telling her what
she had asked, "you see a house, even a hen-run like ours, always costs
ever so much more than rooms--rates and things like servants, don't you
see--and then Ruth used to make a bit with curious bazaar stuff all
gummed on to tins."

It was a mere backwash of his thought, as he drew the question out to a
solution--nothing more. He never thought of a comparison. Why, if the
thing had ever come to that, Helena had her allowance....

But it went home to her, whose early days had bred a diffidence to die
only with the years. Ruth had helped him, then!

"I wish _I_ could do something," she said. "I feel so useless!" She
had forgotten her bold attack with which this dialogue had started, and
her whole mind was filled now with its self-reproach.

Hubert felt a sudden shame. The words threw back his memory to those
first hours in London when the vast City crowd had made her say; "It
makes me feel so useless!" Dear little girl, what happy, jolly days
she had brought to his life since then! And yet she thought that she
was useless....

She seemed so upset. His one idea was consolation. She must not think
he longed for Ruth again, in even one respect!

Perhaps at a less flustered time he might have thought of all that she
did in the house; those charming little meals, hot always at however
variable times; the pretty bowls of flowers; everything so
dainty--green and white--so different from the grimy lodgings.

But now he did not think of that. He took her arm instinctively in his
and spoke what came into his mind.

"Dear little girlie," he said kindly, "I love you to be useless."

But she was not consoled.

CHAPTER VIII

A SCENE IN THE HOME

Hubert Brett could never quite escape from business; he analysed
himself too much. His action sprung from impulse, education, ancestry,
whatever source philosophers may choose to say, but it was followed by
a sequel due to his own introspection. He tended in this way to set up
something like a chain--a sequence of states which might almost be
expected after any given act.

He might have owned, found in a candid vein, that selfishness was his
besetting fault. It had been so--this would be his excuse, if he
indeed admitted what certainly he knew--it had been so from birth; at
any rate since he recalled himself an only son and younger than his
only sister, pampered a