“Lottie!” said her mother, and her father glanced up at her with a face that silenced her.

“When you’ve been half as good a girl as Ellen has been, in this whole matter,” he said, darkly, “it will be time for you to complain of the way you’ve been treated.”

“Oh yes, I know you like Ellen the best,” said the girl, defiantly.

“Don’t say such a thing, Lottie!” said her mother.  “Your father loves all his children alike, and I won’t have you talking so to him.  Ellen has had a great deal to bear, and she has behaved beautifully.  If we are not going to Europe it is because we have decided that it is best not to go, and I wish to hear nothing more from you about it.”

“Oh yes!  And a nice position it leaves me in, when I’ve been taking good-bye of everybody!  Well, I hope to goodness you won’t say anything about it till the Plumptons get away.  I couldn’t have the face to meet them if you did.”

“It won’t be necessary to say anything; or you can say that we’ve merely postponed our sailing.  People are always doing that.”

“It’s not to be a postponement,” said Kenton, so sternly that no one ventured to dispute him, the children because they were afraid of him, and their mother because she was suffering for him.

At the steamship office, however, the authorities represented that it was now so near the date of his sailing that they could not allow him to relinquish his passages except at his own risk.  They would try to sell his ticket for him, but they could not take it back, and they could not promise to sell it.  There was reason in what they said, but if there had been none, they had the four hundred dollars which Kenton had paid for his five berths and they had at least the advantage of him in the argument by that means.  He put the ticket back in his pocket-book without attempting to answer them, and deferred his decision till he could advise with his wife, who, after he left the breakfast-table upon his errand to the steamship office, had abandoned her children to their own devices, and gone to scold Ellen for not eating.

She had not the heart to scold her when she found the girl lying face downward in the pillow, with her thin arms thrown up through the coils and heaps of her loose-flung hair.  She was so alight that her figure scarcely defined itself under the bedclothes; the dark hair, and the white, outstretched arms seemed all there was of her.  She did not stir, but her mother knew she was not sleeping.  “Ellen,” she said, gently, “you needn’t be troubled about our going to Europe.  Your father has gone down to the steamship office to give back his ticket.”

The girl flashed her face round with nervous quickness.  “Gone to give back his ticket!”

“Yes, we decided it last night.  He’s never really wanted to go, and—­”

“But I don’t wish poppa to give up his ticket!” said Ellen.  “He must get it again.  I shall die if I stay here, momma.  We have got to go.  Can’t you understand that?”