“I shouldn’t worry if I were you,” protested Olga.  “It’s much too hot.  Don’t waste your energies amusing the children!  They can quite well play about by themselves.”

“And get up to mischief,” said Nick.  “No, I’m on the job, overlooking the whole crowd of you, and I’ll do it thoroughly.  When old Jim comes home he’ll find a model household awaiting him.  By the way, I had a letter from him this afternoon.  The kiddie is stronger already, and Muriel as happy as a queen.  I shall hear from her to-morrow.”

“Don’t you wish you were with them?” questioned Olga.  “It would be much more fun than staying here to chaperone me.”

Nick looked quizzical.  “Oh, there’s plenty of fun to be had out of that too,” he assured her.  “I take a lively interest in you, my child; always have.”

“You’re a darling,” said Olga, raising her face impulsively.  “I shall write and tell Dad what care you are taking of us all.”

She kissed him warmly and let him go, smiling at the tuneless humming that accompanied his departure.  Who at a casual glance would have taken Nick Ratcliffe for one of the keenest politicians of his party, a man whom friend and foe alike regarded as too brilliant to be ignored?  He had even been jestingly described as “that doughty champion of the British Empire”—­an epithet that Olga cherished jealously because it had not been bestowed wholly in jest.

His general appearance was certainly the reverse of imposing, and in this particular, to her intense gratification, Olga resembled him.  She had the same quick, pale eyes, with the shrewdness of observation that never needed to look twice, the same colourless brows and lashes and insignificant features; but she possessed one redeeming point which Nick lacked.  What with him was an impish grin of sheer exuberance, with her was a smile of rare enchantment, very fleeting, with a fascination quite indescribable but none the less capable of imparting to her pale young face a charm that only the greatest artists have ever been able to depict.  People were apt to say of Olga Ratcliffe that she had a face that lighted up well.  Her ready intelligence was ardent enough to illuminate her.  No one was ever dull in her society.  Certainly in her temperament at least there was nothing colorless.  Where she loved she loved intensely, and she hated in the same way, quite thoroughly and without dissimulation.

Maxwell Wyndham, for instance, the subject of her recent conversation with Nick, she had disliked wholeheartedly from the commencement of their acquaintance, and he was perfectly aware of the fact.  He could not well have been otherwise, but he was by no means disconcerted thereby.  It even seemed as if he took a malicious pleasure in developing her dislike upon every opportunity that presented itself, and since he was living in the house as her father’s assistant, opportunities were by no means infrequent.

But there was no open hostility between them.  Under Dr. Ratcliffe’s eye, his daughter was always frigidly polite to the unwelcome outsider, and the outsider accepted her courtesy with a sarcastic smile, knowing exactly how much it was worth.