er
stepmother was reading the letter, and Helen preserved silence as though
she were in a church. With care that the dishes should not click
against each other, she put the newly washed china on the dresser and
laid the silver in its place, and now and then she glanced at Notya, who
stood beside the table. It was some time before she folded the letter
with a crackle and looked up. Her eyes wandered from Helen to Miriam,
and rested there with an unconsciousness so rare as to be startling.

"Philip is ill," she said in a voice carried by her thoughts to a great
distance. She corrected herself. "Your father is ill." She picked up the
envelope and looked at it. "That's why his writing is so--straggly." She
seemed to be thinking not only of Philip Caniper, but of many things
besides, so that her words, like her thoughts, came through obstacles.

Intensely interested in a Notya moved to some sign of an emotion which
was not annoyance, Miriam stood in the doorway and took care to make no
movement which might betray her; but Helen stared at the fire and
suffered the pain she had always felt for her stepmother's distresses.

"However--" Mildred Caniper said at last, and set briskly to work, while
Miriam disappeared into the shadows of the hall and Helen watched the
flames playing round the kettle in which the water for Uncle Alfred's
breakfast was bubbling.

"How ill is he?" she asked.

"Are you speaking of your father?"

"Yes--please."

"I wish you would use names instead of pronouns. A good deal worse, I am
afraid."

"And there's nobody to look after him--our father?"

"Certainly there is."

"Oh! I'm glad," Helen said, looking candidly at Notya. "We can't pretend
to care about him--can we? But I don't like to have a father who is
ill."

"If he had known that--" the other began, and stopped the foolish little
sarcasm in time. "It is no use discussing things, Helen. We have to do
them."

"Well, let us go to Italy," Helen said.

Mildred Caniper did not conceal her surprise. Her lips dropped apart,
and she stood, balancing in a spoon the egg she was about to boil for
Uncle Alfred, and gazed at Helen, before she recovered herself and said
easily, "You are rather absurd, Helen, aren't you?"

But Helen knew that she was not. "I thought that was just what you were
wanting to do," she answered.

The egg went into the saucepan and was followed by another.

"We can't," Mildred Caniper said with the admonishing air wh