Putting on an old black velvet jacket laid out for him across a chair, and lighting the pipe that he could never bring himself to smoke in his formal dinner clothes, he went to the right-hand cabinet, and opened it.  He stood with a smile, taking up coins one by one.  In this particular drawer they were of the best Byzantine dynasty, very rare.  He did not see that Cecilia had stolen in, and was silently regarding him.  Her eyes seemed doubting at that moment whether or no she loved him who stood there touching that other mistress of his thoughts—­that other mistress with whom he spent so many evening hours.  The little green-baize cover fell.  Cecilia said suddenly: 

“Stephen, I feel as if I must tell Father where that girl is!”

Stephen turned.

“My dear child,” he answered in his special voice, which, like champagne, seemed to have been dried by artifice, “you don’t want to reopen the whole thing?”

“But I can see he really is upset about it; he’s looking so awfully white and thin.”

“He ought to give up that bathing in the Serpentine.  At his age it’s monstrous.  And surely any other girl will do just as well?”

“He seems to set store by reading to her specially.”

Stephen shrugged his shoulders.  It had happened to him on one occasion to be present when Mr. Stone was declaiming some pages of his manuscript.  He had never forgotten the discomfort of the experience.  “That crazy stuff,” as he had called it to Cecilia afterwards, had remained on his mind, heavy and damp, like a cold linseed poultice.  His wife’s father was a crank, and perhaps even a little more than a crank, a wee bit “touched”—­that she couldn’t help, poor girl; but any allusion to his cranky produce gave Stephen pain.  Nor had he forgotten his experience at dinner.

“He seems to have grown fond of her,” murmured Cecilia.

“But it’s absurd at his time of life!”

“Perhaps that makes him feel it more; people do miss things when they are old!”

Stephen slid the drawer back into its socket.  There was dry decision in that gesture.

“Look here!  Let’s exercise a little common sense; it’s been sacrificed to sentiment all through this wretched business.  One wants to be kind, of course; but one’s got to draw the line.”

“Ah!” said Cecilia; “where?”

“The thing,” went on Stephen, “has been a mistake from first to last.  It’s all very well up to a certain point, but after that it becomes destructive of all comfort.  It doesn’t do to let these people come into personal contact with you.  There are the proper channels for that sort of thing.”

Cecilia’s eyes were lowered, as though she did not dare to let him see her thoughts.

“It seems so horrid,” she said; “and father is not like other people.”

“He is not,” said Stephen dryly; “we had a pretty good instance of that this evening.  But Hilary and your sister are.  There’s something most distasteful to me, too, about Thyme’s going about slumming.  You see what she’s been let in for this afternoon.  The notion of that baby being killed through the man’s treatment of his wife, and that, no doubt, arising from the girl’s leaving them, is most repulsive!”