' Say, Amelie,' he said, ' and what kind of time have you been having? All going serene and domestically? Bertie been behaving himself? Do either of you want anything? You look a bit down, somehow—kind of tired about the eyes.'
Amelie looked up at him; the ' tired about the eyes ' seemed to be a wonderfully true interpretation of how she felt.
' Oh, we trot along,' she said. ' I suppose everyone has their bits of worries. Mámma has when she accepts three dinner invitations for the same evening. You have when your directors give luncheon-parties instead of doing business. We all have.'
' Can't see why you should,' he said. ' I don't like you to worry, Amelie. What's it all about?'
He paused a moment.
' Have you heard anything about Bertie which bothers you?' he asked; ' or hasn't he been good to you?'
She did not answer at once, for, in her rather super-sensitized frame of mind, it seemed to her that her father's first question was not vague or general, but that he had some special, definite reason for asking. From that it was but the shortest of links necessary to couple the question with that which grew mushroom-like in the shadow of her mind.
' No; he has been perfectly good to me, and I have heard nothing that bothers me,' she said.
She looked up at her father as she spoke. He was standing close to her—a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. In his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. Even now, as she knew—for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch—there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers
