t I'm not. Aren't you glad, uncle?"

"Glad inna' the word," said he.

"_You must help me_," she repeated.

CHAPTER XXIII

NOCTURNAL

Many things which previously had not been plain to James Ollerenshaw
were plain to him that night, as, in the solitude of his chosen room, he
reflected upon the astonishing menu that Helen had offered him by way of
supplement to his tea. But the chief matter in his mind was the great,
central, burning, blinding fact of the endless worry caused to him by
his connection with the chit. He had bought Wilbraham Hall under her
threat to leave him if he did not buy it. Even at Trafalgar-road she had
filled the little house with worry. And now, within a dozen hours of
arriving in it, she had filled Wilbraham Hall with worry--filled it to
its farthest attic. If she had selected it as a residence, she would
have filled the Vatican with worry. All that James demanded was a quiet
life; and she would not let him have it. He wished he was back again in
Trafalgar-road. He wished he had never met Helen and her sunshade in the
park.

That is to say, he asserted to himself positively that he wished he had
never met Helen. But he did not mean it.

And so he was to help her to wrest Andrew Dean from Lilian Swetnam! He
was to take part in a shameful conspiracy! He was to assist in ruining
an innocent child's happiness! And he was deliberately to foster the raw
material of a scandal in which he himself would be involved! He, the
strong, obstinate, self-centred old man who had never, till Helen's
advent, done anything except to suit his own convenience!

The one bright spot was that Helen had no genuine designs on Emanuel
Prockter. As a son-in-law, Andrew Dean would be unbearable; but Emanuel
Prockter would have been--well, impossible. Andrew Dean (he mused) was
at any rate a man whom you could talk to and look at without feeling
sick.

When he had gazed at the affair from all points of view, and repeated to
himself the same deep moral truths (such as "There's no doing nowt wi' a
young woman afore she's forty") about thirty-nine times, and pitied
himself from every quarter of the compass, he rose to go to bed; he did
not expect to sleep. But the gas was not yet in order, and he had only
one candle, which was nearly at its latter end. The ladies--Helen and
Georgiana--had retired long since.

He left his little room, and was just setting forth on the adventure of
discovering his bedchamber, wh