“Clumsy fool!” Andrew was distinctly heard to exclaim during his swift passage to the floor.

The ship and ocean were incurably disintegrated into a mess of coloured cardboard, linen, and sticks.

And catastrophes even more dreadful might have occurred had it not been for the calm and wise tact of Helen.  Where a person is pleased by an event, that person can usually, without too much difficulty, exercise a calm and wise tact upon other persons whom the event has not pleased.  And Helen was delighted by the catastrophe to the ship and ocean.  The ship and ocean had formed no part in her scheme for the decoration of the hall; her one poor solace had been that the relative proportions of the hall and of the ship and ocean were such that even a careful observer might have spent hours in the former without discovering the latter; on the other hand, some blundering ninny might have lighted instantly on the ship and ocean, and awkwardly inquired what it was doing there.  So Helen was really enchanted by the ruin.  She handled her men with notable finesse:  Uncle James savage and vindictive, but uncertain upon whom to pour out his anger; Emanuel nursing his injured innocence; and Andrew Dean nursing his elbow, his head, and vengeance.  She also found a moment in which to calm Georgiana, who had run flying and hysterical into the hall at the sound of the smash.

Even the steps were broken.

After a time harmony was established, both Uncle James and Emanuel being, at bottom, men of peace.  But it was undeniable that Uncle James had lost more than gold, and that Emanuel had been touched in a perilous place—­his conceit of himself.

Then Georgiana swept up the ship and ocean, and James retired to his own little room, where he assumed his Turkish cap, and began to arrange his personal effects in a manner definite and final, which would be a law for ever to the servants of Wilbraham Hall.

Left with the two young men, Helen went from triumph to triumph.  In quite a few minutes she had them actually talking to each other.  And she ended by speeding them away together.  And by the time they departed each was convinced that Georgiana’s apron, on Helen, was one of the most bewitching manifestations of the inexpressibly feminine that he had ever been privileged to see.

They took themselves off by a door at the farther end of the hall behind the stairs, whence there was a short cut through the undulating grounds to the main road.

Helen ascended to the state bedroom, where there was simply everything to be done; Georgiana followed her, after having made up the fires, and, while helping to unpack boxes, offered gossamer hints—­fluffy, scarcely palpable, elusive things—­to her mistress that her real ambition had always been to be a lady’s-maid, and to be served at meals by the third, or possibly the fourth, house-maid.  And the hall of Wilbraham Hall was abandoned for a space to silence and solitude.