Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister and looking over.  He noticed—­by a common trick of the perceptive powers at crises of anguish—­how the slender white pilasters, carved and twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black gown.

“It’s really true—­what I say about business, papa,” she pursued.  “I’m very much in earnest, and so is Rupert.  I do wish you’d think of that place near Heneage.  It will be so lovely for me to feel you’re there; and there can’t be any reason for your going on working any longer.”

“No; there’s no reason for that,” he managed to say.

“Well then?” she demanded, with an air of triumph.  “It’s just as I said.  You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above all, to give up.  It might have been better if you’d done it long ago.”

“I couldn’t,” he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a cry.  “I tried to, ... but things were so involved ... almost from the first....”

“Well, as long as they’re not involved now there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be better late than never.”

“But they are involved now,” he said, with an intensity so poignant that he was surprised she didn’t notice it.

“Then straighten them out.  Isn’t that what we’ve been saying all along, Cousin Rodney and I?  Take a partner; take two partners.  Cousin Rodney says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before—­”

“I couldn’t....  Things weren’t shipshape enough ... not even then.”

“I’m sure it could be managed,” she asserted, confidently; “and if you don’t do it now, papa, when I’m being married and going away for good, you’ll never do it at all.  That’s my fear.  I don’t want to live over there without you, papa; and I’m afraid that’s what you’re going to let me in for.”  She moved from the banister, and continued her way upward, speaking over her shoulder as she ascended.  “In the mean time, you really must go to bed.  You look tired and rather pale—­just as I do after a dull party.  Good night; and don’t stay up.”

She reached the floor above, and went toward her room.  He felt strangled, speechless.  There was a sense of terror too in the thought that his nerve, the nerve on which he had counted so much, was going to fail him.

“Olivia!”

His voice was so sharp that she hurried back to the top of the stairs.

“What is it, papa?  Aren’t you well?”

It was the sight of her face, anxious and suddenly white, peering down through the half-light of the hall that finally unmanned him.  With a heart-sick feeling he turned away from the stairway.

“Yes; I’m all right.  I only wanted you to know that ... that ...  I shall be working rather late.  You mustn’t be disturbed ... if you hear me moving about.”