CHAPTER XXII.
"Daddy," Janet said to her father a few days after their return to town; "I've been thinking that we might--that you might--be of use in helping Frida to place something somewhere else than in that eternal picture paper." "For instance ?" "Oh, in _Peterson's_, or the _London Magazine_, or _Piccadilly_." It was in the library after dinner, and Lawrence Cardiff was smoking.

He took the slender stem of his pipe from his lips and pressed down the tobacco in the bowl with a, caressing thumb, looking appreciatively, as he did it, at the mocking buffoon's face that was carved on it.
"It seems to me that you are the influential person in those quarters," he said, with the smile that Janet privately thought the most delightfully sympathetic she knew.
"Oh, I'm not really!" the girl answered quickly; "and besides--" she hesitated, to pick words that would hurt her as little as possible--"besides, Frida wouldn't care about my doing it." "Why ?" "I don't know quite why.

But she wouldn't--it's of no use.

I don't think she likes having things done for her by people anything like her own age, and--and standing." Cardiff smiled inwardly at this small insincerity.
Janet's relation with Elfrida was a growing pleasure to him.

He found himself doing little things to enhance it, and fancying himself in some way connected with its initiation.
"But I'm almost certain she would let you do it," his daughter urged.
"_In loco parentis_," Cardiff smiled, and immediately found that the words left an unpleasant taste in his mouth.