“Still nobody in the secret but Lash and Black?”

“Not a soul I hope they’re the right people,” Janet said anxiously.  “I haven’t even told Elfrida,” she added.  “I want to surprise her with an early copy.  She’ll like it, I think.  I like it pretty well myself.  It has an effective leading idea.”

Her father laughed, and threw her a line of Horace which she did not understand.  “Don’t let it take too much time from your other work,” he warned her.  “It’s sure, you know, to be an arrant imitation of somebody, while in your other things you have never been anybody but yourself.”  He looked at her in a way that disarmed his words, and went back to his Revue Bleue.

“Dear old thing!  You want to prepare me for anything, don’t you?  I wonder whom I’ve imitated!  Hardy, I think, most of all—­but then it’s such a ludicrously far-away imitation!  If there’s nothing in the thing but that, it deserves to fall as flat as flat.  But there is, daddy!”

Cardiff laid down his journal again at the appealing note.

“No!” she cried, “I won’t bore you with it now; wait till the proofs come.  Good-night!” She kissed him lightly on the cheek.  “About Elfrida,” she added, still bending over him.  “You’ll be very careful, won’t you, daddy dear—­not to hurt her feelings in any way, I mean?”

After she had gone, Lawrence Cardiff laid down the Revue again and smoked meditatively for half an hour.  During that time he revolved at least five subjects which he thought Elfrida, with proper supervision, might treat effectively.  But the supervision would be very necessary.

A fortnight later Mr. Cardiff sat in the same chair, smoking the same pipe, and alternately frowned and smiled upon the result of that evening’s meditation.  It had reached him by post in the afternoon without an accompanying word; the exquisite self-conscious manuscript seemed to breathe a subdued defiance at him, with the merest ghost of a perfume that Cardiff liked better.  Once or twice he held the pages closer to his face to catch it more perfectly.

Janet had not mentioned the matter to him again; indeed, she had hardly thought of it.  Her whole nature was absorbed in her fight with herself, in the struggle for self-control, which had ceased to come to the surface of her life at intervals, and had now become constant and supreme with her.  Kendal had made it harder for her lately by continually talking of Elfrida.  He brought his interest in her to Janet to discuss as he naturally brought everything that touched him to her, and Janet, believing it to be a lover’s pleasure, could not forbid him.  When he criticised Elfrida, Janet fancied it was to hear her warm defence, which grew oddly reckless in her anxiety to hide the bitterness that tinged it.

“Otherwise,” she permitted herself to reflect, “he is curiously just in his analysis of her—­for a man,” and hated the thought for its touch of disloyalty.