o long as he can
hang about under the dining-room table to sniff up crumbs. With my
temperament it's perfectly humiliating, but I can't help it. I've got
the taste for that English life as a Frenchman gets a taste for
absinthe--knows that it'll be the ruin of him, and yet goes on
drinking."

"I suppose you're not in love with any one over there?"

There was no curiosity in this question. Olivia asked it--she could
scarcely tell why. She noticed that Drusilla stopped writing again and
once more half turned round, though it was not till long afterward that
she attached significance to the fact.

"Who on earth should I be in love with? What put that into your head?"

"Oh, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. You see a great many
men--"

So they went skimming over the surface of confidence, knowing that
beneath what they said there were depths below depths that they dared
not disturb. All the same, it was some relief to both when the maid came
to the door to summon them to luncheon.

IX

During the next day and the next Guion continued ill, so ill that his
daughter had all she could attend to in the small tasks of nursing. The
lull in events, however, gave her the more time for thinking, and in her
thoughts two things struck her as specially strange. Of these, the first
and more remarkable was the degree to which she identified herself with
her father's wrong-doing. The knowledge that she had for so many years
been profiting by his misdeeds produced in her a curious sense of having
shared them. Though she took pains to remind herself that she was
morally guiltless, there was something within her--an imaginative
quality perhaps that rejected the acquittal. Pity, too, counted in her
mental condition, as did also that yearning instinct called maternal,
which keeps women faithful to the weak and the fallen among those they
love. To have washed her own hands and said, "See here! I am innocent!"
would have seemed to her much like desertion of a broken old man who had
no one but her to stand by him. Even while she made attempts to reason
herself out of it, the promptings to the vicarious acceptance of guilt,
more or less native to the exceptionally strong and loyal, was so
potent in her that she found herself saying, in substance if not in
words, "Inasmuch as he did it, I did it, too." It was not a purposely
adopted stand on her part; it was not even clear to her why she was
impelled to take it; she took i