was leaving England
for ever. Of course, if he were going to rescue and recover Gloria, she
would have felt proud and glad. At least she would certainly have felt
proud, and she would have tried to make herself think that she felt
glad, but it would have been a terrible shock to her to hear that he was
going away; and, this shock being averted, she seemed to think no other
trouble an affair of much account. Therefore, she was quite equal to any
embarrassment coming out of what the society papers, or any other
papers, or any persons whatever, might say about her. If she could have
spoken out the full truth she would have said: 'Mr. Ericson, so long as
my father and you are content with what I do, I don't care three rows of
pins what all the rest of the world is saying or thinking of me.' But
she could not quite venture to say this, and so she merely offered the
qualifying remark about his having been a long time out of London.

'Yes, I have,' he said with some bitterness. 'I don't understand the new
ways. In my time--you know I once wrote for newspapers myself, and very
proud I was of it, too, and very proud I am of it--a man would have been
kicked who dragged the name of a young woman into a paper coupled with
conjectures as to the scoundrels who were running after her for her
money.'

'You take it too seriously,' said Helena sweetly. She adored him for his
generous anger, but she only wanted to bring him back to calmness. 'In
London we are used to all that. Why, Mr. Ericson, I have been married in
the newspapers over and over again--I mean I have been engaged to be
married. I don't believe the wedding ceremonial has ever been described,
but I have been engaged times out of mind. Why, I don't believe papa and
I ever have gone abroad, since I came out, without some paragraph
appearing in the society papers announcing my engagement to some foreign
Duke or Count or Marquis. I have been engaged to men I never saw.'

'How does your father like that sort of thing?' the Dictator asked
fiercely.

'My father? Oh, well, of course he doesn't quite like it.'

'I should think not,' Ericson growled--and he made a flourish of his
cane as if he meant to illustrate the sort of action he should like to
take with the publishers of these paragraphs, if he only knew them and
had an opportunity of arguing out the case with them.

'But, then, I think he has got used to it; and of course as a public man
he is helpless, and he can't rese