aps chiefly on hers. You can hardly realize the
number of things she has to take care of--and you'd be one more."

"I confess I don't seize your drift."

"It's not very abstruse, however. Just think. It isn't as if Cousin
Henry had fallen ill, or had died, or had gone to pieces in any of the
ordinary ways. Except for his own discomfort, he might just as well have
been tried and sentenced and sent to prison. He's been as good as there.
Every one knows it's only a special providence that he didn't go. But if
he's escaped that by the skin of his teeth, he hasn't escaped a lot of
other things. He hasn't escaped being without a penny in the world. He
hasn't escaped having his house sold over his head and being turned out
into the streets. He hasn't escaped reaching a perfectly impotent old
age, with not a soul on this earth to turn to but Olivia."

"What about me?"

"Would _you_ take him?"

"I shouldn't _take_ him exactly. If he was my father-in-law"--he made a
little grimace--"I suppose I could pension him off somewhere, or board
him out, like an old horse. One couldn't have him round."

"H'm! I dare say that would do--but I doubt it. If you'd ever been a
daughter you might feel that you couldn't dispose of a poor, old,
broken-down father quite so easily. After all, he's not a horse. You
might more or less forsake him when all was going well, and yet want to
stick to him through thick and thin if he came a cropper. Look at me! I
go off and leave my poor old dad for a year and more at a time--because
he's a saint; but if he wasn't--especially if he'd got into any such
scrape as Cousin Henry's--which isn't thinkable--but if he did--I'd
never leave him again. That's my temperament. It's every girl's
temperament. It's Olivia's. But all that is neither here nor there. If
she married you, her whole life would be given up to trying to make you
blend with a set of circumstances you couldn't possibly blend with. It
would be worse than singing one tune to an orchestra playing another.
She'd go mad with the attempt."

"Possibly; except for one factor which you've overlooked."

"Oh, love! Yes, yes. I thought you'd say that." Drusilla tossed her
hands impatiently. "Love will do a lot, but it won't do everything. You
can't count on it to work miracles in a sophisticated company like the
Sussex Rangers. They've passed the age of faith for that sort of thing."

"I don't see," he said, speaking very slowly, "that the Rangers need b