war, my girl. To be a soldier means to
obey orders from general down to corporal. Moreover, your uncle has
given me a whole lot of trouble, and I wouldn't insist on a relationship
which does us no credit. I've held his chin above water about as long as
I'm going to."

Elsie was getting deeper into the motives and private opinions of her
father than ever before, and, as he spoke, her mind reverted to the
handsome figure of the young soldier as he stood before her in the
studio, asking for a kindlier good-bye. His head was really beautiful,
and his eyes were deep and sincere. She looked up at her father with
frowning brows. "I thought you liked Mr. Sennett? He told me you got
him his place."

Brisbane laughed. "My dear chicken, he was a political choice. He was
doing work for our side, and had to be paid."

"Do you mean you knew the kind of a man he was when you put him there?"

Brisbane pulled himself up short. "Now see here, my daughter, you're
getting out of your bailiwick."

"But I want to understand--if you knew he was stealing--"

"I didn't know it. How should I know it? I put him there to keep him
busy. I didn't suppose he was a sot and a petty plunderer. Now let's
have no more of this." Brisbane was getting old and a trifle irritable,
but he was still master of himself. "I don't know why I should be taken
to task by my own daughter."

Elsie said no more, but her lips straightened and her eyes grew
reflective. As the coffee and cigars came in, she left the two men at
the table and went out into the music-room. It seemed very lonely in the
big house that night, and she sat down at the piano to play, thinking to
cure herself of an uneasy conscience. She was almost as good a pianist
as a painter, and the common criticism of her was on this score. "Bee
does everything _too_ well," Penrose said.

She played softly, musingly, and, for some reason, sadly. "I wonder if I
have done him an injustice?" she thought. And then that brutal leer on
her father's face came to disturb her. "I wish he hadn't spoken to me
like that," she said. "I don't like his political world. I wish he
would get out of it. It isn't nice."

In the end, she left off playing and went slowly up to her studio, half
determined to write a letter of apology. Her "work-shop," which had been
added to the house since her return from Paris, was on a level with her
sitting-room, which served as a reception hall to the studio itself. Her
artist friends