“My box is outside the door. I made them bring it. The woman--is that Mariuccia?--would not take it in. But she let me come in. She was not suspicious. She did not say, ‘If you are Constance.’” And here she laughed, with a sound that grated upon Mr Waring’s nerves. He jumped up suddenly from his chair. “I had no proof that you were Constance,” he said, “though I believed it. But only your mother’s daughter could reproduce that laugh.” “Has Frances got it?” the girl cried, with an instant lighting up of opposition in her eyes; “for I am like you, but she is the image of mamma.” He turned round and looked at Frances, who, feeling that an entire circle of new emotions, unknown to her, had come into being at a bound, stood with a passive, frightened look, spectator of everything, not knowing how to adapt herself to the new turn of affairs. “By Jove!” her father said, with an air of exasperation she had never seen in him before, “that is true! But I had never noticed it. Even Frances. You’ve come to set us all by the ears.” “Oh no! I’ll tell you, if you like, why I came. Mamma--has been more aggravating than usual. I said to myself you would be sure to understand what that meant. And something arose--I will tell you about it after--a complication, something that mamma insisted I should do, though I had made up my mind not to do it.” “You had better,” said her father, with a smile, “take care what ideas on that subject you put into your sister’s head.” Constance paused, and looked at Frances with a look which was half scrutinising, half contemptuous. “Oh, she is not like me,” she said. “Mamma was very aggravating, as you know she can be. She wanted me---- But I’ll tell you after.” And then she began: “I hope, because you live in Italy, papa, you don’t think you ought to be a medieval parent; but that sort of thing in Belgravia, you know, is too ridiculous. It was so out of the question that it was some time before I understood. It was not exactly a case of being locked up in my room and kept on bread and water; but something of the sort. I was so much astonished at first, I did not know what to do; and then it became intolerable. I had nobody I could appeal to, for everybody agreed with her. Markham is generally a safe person; but even Markham took her side. So I immediately thought of you. I said to myself, One’s father is the right person to protect one. And I knew, of course, that if anybody in the world could understand how impossible it is to live with mamma when she has taken a thing into her head, it would be you.” Waring kept his eye upon Frances while this was being said, with an almost comic embarrassment. It was half laughable; but it was painful, as so many laughable things are; and there was something like alarm, or rather timidity, in the look. The man looked afraid of the little girl--whom all her life he had treated as a child--and her clear sensible eyes.