Delancy, who from long experience knew much concerning his niece's wilfulness, now read aright the resolute expression on her face. He tugged nervously at his tufts of whisker, and spoke in a tone of resignation: "Oh, tell her, Charles, and have done with it.... Or, listen, Cicily. It's this way: These men are getting more money than they ought to get. Charles can't make a penny profit, running his business this way. That's all there is to it--he's got to cut them ten per cent. I've advised it, myself." Cicily's charming nose was now distinctly tip-tilted, whatever might be its normal line. "Yes, I'd expect you to advise it, Uncle Jim," she remarked, dryly. She turned to her husband, accusingly. "But, Charles, there is no reason why you should follow his advice. Why didn't you ask me? I'm your partner. I don't think you have treated me fairly in this." Hamilton, overwrought and exasperated by the multiplication of his worries, began a sharp answer; but it was interrupted by the decisiveness with which his wife went on speaking: "Charles, you have treated me like a child, like a fool.... And you said that you'd let me help you!" This reproach appealed to Hamilton as grossly unfair. "Why, Cicily," he exclaimed, "I did let you help. I've let you do everything that you wanted to do--no matter how--" In a sudden access of discretion, he choked back the "foolish." Delancy, presuming on the right of criticism that had been his during the years of guardianship, spoke with a candor that was not flattering. "He let you do more than I'd have let you do. He let you waste your money on bath-tubs and libraries, and such foolishness, to make the men dissatisfied. I wish somebody would tell me what a man working for two dollars a day can do with a bath-tub and a library at the works." "If anybody were to tell you, you wouldn't listen," was Cicily's pert retort. Delancy tugged at his wisp of whisker, and wagged his head dolefully. "I don't know what young women these days are coming to," was his melancholy comment. "What you men are driving us to, you mean!" Cicily fairly snapped. It was difficult enough to manage her husband, without having her position jeopardized by the interference of this meddlesome old man, who stood for that exclusion of her sex against which she was fighting. She went to the chair in which Ferguson had been sitting, and reclined there in a posture of graceful ease that was far from expressing the turmoil of her spirit. As he watched her movements, and studied the loveliness of her, with her delicate face aglow and her amber eyes brilliant in this mood of excitement, Hamilton forgot his worriment for the moment in uxorious admiration. He was smiling fondly on his wife, even as Delancy uttered an exclamation of rebuke to him: "And you're her husband!" His emphasis made it clear that a husband like himself would have suppressed such insubordination long ago.