to move the world as he chose. But he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she might feel—just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift.
' We have always been chums, Amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. ' When you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. I used to be pretty smart at it; I used to be devilish proud of the way I could take the frown out of your little forehead.'
She held out her hand to him.
' You are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. ' But I tell you this truth: it is only I who have been worrying. I have been imagining all sorts of things, so that I have got to believe them. That is the matter with me.'
' You have heard nothing specific?' he asked.
Again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea.
She got up at once.
' Nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. ' Now I am going. Take care of yourself, pápa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. I adore its sleepiness myself, and I know you can never rouse it, otherwise I should not suggest it.'
The carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in.
' Mrs. Emsworth's,' she said to the footman.
As she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. She was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. That she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself, ' What if it is true?'
She found Mrs. Emsworth at home and delighted to see
