"Yes...." He paused a moment, and then he said, "I am very troubled about her, Caroline." Indeed, his voice sounded very heavy with trouble. Caroline waited for him to go on. "She seems to be slipping out of my hands," said Haverford; "try as I will, I cannot satisfy her, or keep pace with her. I assure you these last few weeks I have been like a creature on wires. I have not known from one moment to the next what she wished me to do. Perhaps I am too exacting. I don't know. I only know that I am wretched, that I cannot sleep for thinking about her; thinking, not in a selfish fashion, ... I give you my word it is not that, but troubling about her...." He sat forward, and stared into the fire. "The last time we were together we quarrelled rather badly," he said then. Still Caroline said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was a moment in which silence was more helpful than words. "We quarrelled about Cuthbert," the man said, rising, and standing by the fireplace. "She has been sitting to him for her portrait. That I don't object to; but what I do object to most emphatically--what seems so wrong, so unmanly on his part, so weak, so foolish on hers--is the fact that he has been getting money out of her. I taxed him with it.... He could not deny it. And when I brought the matter to her, and insisted on giving her back the money, she said very bitter things to me." He drew in his breath sharply; then, as if to himself, he said-- "What is there, who is there, that can help me to give this woman happiness? I hoped I was going to do it, but I have failed, failed right through!" "How do you know that you have failed?" asked Caroline, speaking for the first time. "She is not an easy person to deal with, yet it is just her very elusiveness which gives her her hold on us. And I know one thing. I can affirm this, that if there is a creature on this earth whom she honestly respects and values, you are that person." "Respect!" said Haverford. The fire-glow lit up his face, and she saw that he was smiling faintly. He was silent for a time, and then he said-- "I don't regard the question of Cuthbert as a serious one, notwithstanding that she has taken this peculiar attitude, ranging herself with him against me, and declaring my resolution to let him work up to fortune and fame as a cruel, an almost unnatural, thing; there are other points far more serious, unfortunately, which make the situation so difficult just now. I have repeatedly asked her not to go to Lea Abbey, yet, you see, she has gone there. And I have felt myself compelled to absolutely forbid her to have any sort of intercourse with Sir Samuel Broxbourne. To-day I learned quite by chance that he has been staying in Devonshire the greater part of the time she has been there. The man is her shadow. Wherever she goes he appears, and when we meet there is a look about him as though he would pick a quarrel with me." Then Haverford pulled himself up suddenly.