She asked for tea, but he said they were in France, and must conform to French taste. When Marie Antoinette was informed that the people wanted bread, etc., Evelyn thought Marie Antoinette must have been a cruel woman. But she liked chocolate and the brioche, and henceforth they were brought to her bedside, and in a Sèvres service, a present from Owen. "When they had finished the little meal he rang for writing material, and said-- "Now, my dear Evelyn, you must write to your father." "_Must_ I? What shall I say? Oh, Owen, I cannot write. If I did, father would come over here, and then--" "I'll tell you what to say. I'll dictate the letter you ought to write. You need not give him any address, but you must let him know you're well, and why you intend to remain abroad. It is by relieving his mind on these subjects that you'll save yourself from the vexation of his hunting you up here.... Come, now," he said, noticing the agonised and bewildered look on Evelyn's face, "this is the only disagreeable hour in the day--you must put up with it. Here is the pen. Now write-- "'My DEAR FATHER,--I should be happy in Paris, very happy, if it were not for the knowledge of the grief that my flight must have occasioned you. Of course I have acted very wrongly, very wickedly--'" "But," said Evelyn, "you told me I was acting rightly, that to do otherwise would be madness." "Yes, and I only told you the truth. But in writing to your father you must adopt the conventional tone. There's no use in trying to persuade your father you did right.... I don't know, though. Scratch out 'I have acted wrongly and very wickedly,' and write-- "'I will not ask you to think that I have acted otherwise than wrongly, for, of course, as a father you can hold no other opinion, but being also a clever man, an artist, you will perhaps be inclined to admit that my wrong-doing is not so irreparable a wrong-doing as it might have been in other and easily imagined circumstances.'" Full stop. "You've got that--'so irreparable a wrong-doing as it might have been in other and easily imagined circumstances'?" "Yes." "'Father dear, you know that if I had remained in Dulwich my voice would have been wasted, not through my fault or yours, but through the fault of circumstances.' "You have got circumstances a few lines higher up, so put 'through the fault of fate.'" "Father will never believe that I wrote this letter." "That doesn't matter--the truth is the truth from whoever it comes."