"Philip is ill," she said in a voice carried by her thoughts to a great distance. She corrected herself. "Your father is ill." She picked up the envelope and looked at it. "That's why his writing is so--straggly." She seemed to be thinking not only of Philip Caniper, but of many things besides, so that her words, like her thoughts, came through obstacles. Intensely interested in a Notya moved to some sign of an emotion which was not annoyance, Miriam stood in the doorway and took care to make no movement which might betray her; but Helen stared at the fire and suffered the pain she had always felt for her stepmother's distresses. "However--" Mildred Caniper said at last, and set briskly to work, while Miriam disappeared into the shadows of the hall and Helen watched the flames playing round the kettle in which the water for Uncle Alfred's breakfast was bubbling. "How ill is he?" she asked. "Are you speaking of your father?" "Yes--please." "I wish you would use names instead of pronouns. A good deal worse, I am afraid." "And there's nobody to look after him--our father?" "Certainly there is." "Oh! I'm glad," Helen said, looking candidly at Notya. "We can't pretend to care about him--can we? But I don't like to have a father who is ill." "If he had known that--" the other began, and stopped the foolish little sarcasm in time. "It is no use discussing things, Helen. We have to do them." "Well, let us go to Italy," Helen said. Mildred Caniper did not conceal her surprise. Her lips dropped apart, and she stood, balancing in a spoon the egg she was about to boil for Uncle Alfred, and gazed at Helen, before she recovered herself and said easily, "You are rather absurd, Helen, aren't you?" But Helen knew that she was not. "I thought that was just what you were wanting to do," she answered. The egg went into the saucepan and was followed by another. "We can't," Mildred Caniper said with the admonishing air which sat like an imposition on her; "we cannot always do as we wish." "Oh, I know that," Helen said. She put on a pair of gloves, armed herself with brooms and dusters, and left the room. It seemed to her that people wilfully complicated life. She put a just value on the restraint which had been a great part of her training, but a pretence which had the transparency of its weakness moved her to a patient kind of scorn, and in that moment she had a flash of insight which showed her that she had sometimes failed to understand her stepmother because she had not suspected the variability of the elder woman's character. Mildred Caniper produced an impression of strength in which she herself did not believe; she had imprisoned her impulses in coldness, and they only escaped in the sharp utterances of her tongue; she was uncertain of her power, and she insisted on its acceptance.