“I don't want them, that's why,” Gregory specified. “Perhaps I'd like to have a typewriter.” “You're not very modest.” It was Helena again. “It's father, isn't it? It isn't you.” “Listen,” Lee broke in, “I came up here to be with two good children; but where are they?” “I'm one.” Helena, freeing herself definitely, closed her arms in a sweet warmth about his neck. “I'm one, too,” Gregory called urgently. “No,” his father pressed him back; “you must stay in bed. They are both here, I can see.” He wondered if, everything else forgotten, his children could constitute a sufficient engagement; but the sentimental picture, cast across his thoughts, of himself being led by a child holding each of his hands defeated it. He was turned in another direction. Yet, tonight, they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great deal. For what? He couldn't--as usual--answer; but the memory of Savina, stronger than Fanny, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his neck and blurred the image of Gregory. “Have you said your prayer?” he asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed, they did that with Martha. “I'll say mine again,” Gregory volunteered. Again--a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying at a paternal knee to a fresco of saccharine angels! “Once is enough,” he answered hurriedly. “I am sure you do it very nicely.” “Well, anyhow, better than Helena,” Gregory admitted. “She hurries so.” Lee instructed him to confine his observations to his own performance. Now was the time for him to deliver a small sermon on prayer to Helena. He recognized this, but he was merely incensed by it. What could he reply if they questioned him about his own devotions? Should he acknowledge that he thought prayer was no more than a pleasant form of administering to a sense of self-importance? Or, at most, a variety of self-help? Luckily they didn't ask. How outraged Fanny would be--he would be driven from the community--if he confessed the slightest of his doubts to his children. If, say at the table, when they were all together, he should drop his negative silence, his policy of nonintervention, what a horrified breathlessness would follow. His children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew him; he was a stranger to his own house. If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena and Gregory for assistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He wanted to call them back, “Helena and Gregory, Gregory!” But he remained quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep, silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was facing.