“Is there anybody as does understand him?” James asked.

“I do,” said she.  “And that’s flat.  And I’ve got to marry him, and you must help me.  I wanted to tell you, and now I’ve told you.  Don’t you think I’ve done right in being quite open with you?  Most girls are so foolish in these things.  But I’m not.  Aren’t you glad, uncle?”

“Glad inna’ the word,” said he.

“You must help me,” she repeated.

CHAPTER XXIII

NOCTURNAL

Many things which previously had not been plain to James Ollerenshaw were plain to him that night, as, in the solitude of his chosen room, he reflected upon the astonishing menu that Helen had offered him by way of supplement to his tea.  But the chief matter in his mind was the great, central, burning, blinding fact of the endless worry caused to him by his connection with the chit.  He had bought Wilbraham Hall under her threat to leave him if he did not buy it.  Even at Trafalgar-road she had filled the little house with worry.  And now, within a dozen hours of arriving in it, she had filled Wilbraham Hall with worry—­filled it to its farthest attic.  If she had selected it as a residence, she would have filled the Vatican with worry.  All that James demanded was a quiet life; and she would not let him have it.  He wished he was back again in Trafalgar-road.  He wished he had never met Helen and her sunshade in the park.

That is to say, he asserted to himself positively that he wished he had never met Helen.  But he did not mean it.

And so he was to help her to wrest Andrew Dean from Lilian Swetnam!  He was to take part in a shameful conspiracy!  He was to assist in ruining an innocent child’s happiness!  And he was deliberately to foster the raw material of a scandal in which he himself would be involved!  He, the strong, obstinate, self-centred old man who had never, till Helen’s advent, done anything except to suit his own convenience!

The one bright spot was that Helen had no genuine designs on Emanuel Prockter.  As a son-in-law, Andrew Dean would be unbearable; but Emanuel Prockter would have been—­well, impossible.  Andrew Dean (he mused) was at any rate a man whom you could talk to and look at without feeling sick.

When he had gazed at the affair from all points of view, and repeated to himself the same deep moral truths (such as “There’s no doing nowt wi’ a young woman afore she’s forty”) about thirty-nine times, and pitied himself from every quarter of the compass, he rose to go to bed; he did not expect to sleep.  But the gas was not yet in order, and he had only one candle, which was nearly at its latter end.  The ladies—­Helen and Georgiana—­had retired long since.

He left his little room, and was just setting forth on the adventure of discovering his bedchamber, when a bell rang in the bowels of the house.  His flesh crept.  It was as if—­