"Why not tell him so, and square yourself with him ?" Adelaide, too hurt to venture speech, turned away.

She lingered a while in the library; on her way down the hall to ascend to her own room she looked in at her father.

There he sat so still that but for the regular rise and fall of his chest she would have thought him dead.

"He's asleep," she murmured, the tears standing in her eyes and raining in her heart.

Her mother she could judge impartially; her mother's disregard of the changes which had come to assume so much importance in her own and Arthur's lives often made her wince.