“But, father, couldn’t you write him a letter, asking for it back?  He’s such a nice old man!  I’m sure he didn’t mean to steal the scarab.”

Mr. Peters’ overwrought soul blew off steam in the shape of a passionate snort.

“Didn’t mean to steal it!  What do you think he meant to do—­take it away and keep it safe for me for fear I should lose it?  Didn’t mean to steal it!  Bet you he’s well-known in society as a kleptomaniac.  Bet you that when his name is announced his friends pick up their spoons and send in a hurry call to police headquarters for a squad to come and see that he doesn’t sneak the front door.  Of course he meant to steal it!  He has a museum of his own down in the country.  My Cheops is going to lend tone to that.  I’d give five thousand dollars to get it back.  If there’s a man in this country with the spirit to break into that castle and steal that scarab and hand it back to me, there’s five thousand waiting for him right here; and if he wants to he can knock that old safe blower on the head with a jimmy into the bargain.”

“But, father, why can’t you simply go to him and say it’s yours and that you must have it back?”

“And have him come back at me by calling off this engagement of yours?  Not if I know it!  You can’t go about the place charging a man with theft and ask him to go on being willing to have his son marry your daughter, can you?  The slightest suggestion that I thought he had stolen this scarab and he would do the Proud Old English Aristocrat and end everything.  He’s in the strongest position a thief has ever been in.  You can’t get at him.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“You don’t think at all.  That’s the trouble with you,” said Mr. Peters.

Years of indigestion had made Mr. Peters’ temper, even when in a normal mood, perfectly impossible; in a crisis like this it ran amuck.  He vented it on Aline because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aline; because the fact of her sweet, gentle disposition, combined with the fact of their relationship, made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods.  While his wife had lived he had bullied her.  On her death Aline had stepped into the vacant position.

Aline did not cry, because she was not a girl who was given to tears; but, for all her placid good temper, she was wounded.  She was a girl who liked everything in the world to run smoothly and easily, and these scenes with her father always depressed her.  She took advantage of a lull in Mr. Peters’ flow of words and slipped from the room.

Her cheerfulness had received a shock.  She wanted sympathy.  She wanted comforting.  For a moment she considered George Emerson in the role of comforter; but there were objections to George in this character.  Aline was accustomed to tease and chat with George, but at heart she was a little afraid of him; and instinct told her that, as comforter, he would be too volcanic and supermanly for a girl who was engaged to marry another man in June.  George, as comforter, would be far too prone to trust to action rather than to the soothing power of the spoken word.  George’s idea of healing the wound, she felt, would be to push her into a cab and drive to the nearest registrar’s.