plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses;
inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that
was horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He
had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no
light thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with such a face
and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed
of, it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite
familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he
recognised his younger daughter's happy aspect as a sensible value, he
had from the first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
wonder was not that in spite of everything his own had helped him; the
great wonder was that it hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to
its old, eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop
into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.
She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
really ask me to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"

She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you
as yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."

"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"

"Oh dear, no; not at all. That's no part of the question. If I haven't
understood you by this time, I never shall, and it doesn't matter. It
has seemed to me that you may be lived with, but not that you may be
understood. Of course I've not the least idea how you get on."

"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.

His daughter took in the place again, and it might well have seemed odd
that in so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What
showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was somehow
sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all,
a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."

"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly inquired, "that I've
not made away with myself?"

She treated