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Rh him the news, and Helena hoped that this was the case to-day. She could let Jessie know the event of the afternoon with less embarrassment if there was somebody else present. She could tell her father about it much more easily than she could tell Jessie alone. She would sit close to him, and whisper and hide her head … her sense of drama would make it all quite simple.

She fastened one of the cream-coloured roses that Archie had brought her into the front of her dress and went down to her father's room. It was a stale little apartment, dry and brown and smoked like a kippered herring, furnished chiefly with books and files and decorated with the produce of oriental bazaars, spears and shells and things suggestive of mummies. He was in a big basket chair close to the window, and in the window-seat, as she had hoped, sat Jessie, with the evening paper.

Helena had not forgotten that she had sent a message to him that she had a headache, and to Jessie, that a friend had come to see her with a wish for a private conversation. She made these little plans quickly perhaps but always coolly, and remembered them afterwards. Sometimes a little delicate adjustment was necessary, but she seldom got caught out.…

"Darling daddy," she said, "may I pay you a little visit? Or are you and Jessie engrossed in something I shan't understand?"

"No, come in, dear," said he. "How's the headache?"

She hovered for a moment like some bright bird, and then perched herself on the arm of his chair, between him and her sister.

"It's quite gone, ever so many thanks," she said. "I think I must have had a little snooze just before tea, which took it away. And then, as I told Jessie, somebody came here especially to have a little talk to me. Daddy, how delicious your cigar smells!"