"Yes, thank you," Helen said, with serious politeness. She made a movement unnatural to her in its violence, because she was forcing herself to speak. "But you don't mind if the boys do things like that." She hesitated and plunged again. "It's Miriam. You're not fair to her. You never have been." Over Mrs. Caniper's small face there swept changes of expression which Helen was not to forget. Anger and surprise contended together, widening her eyes and lips, and these were both overcome, after a struggle, by a revelation of self-pity not less amazing to the woman than to the girl. "Has she ever been fair to me?" Mildred Caniper asked stumblingly, before she went in haste, and Helen knew well why she fumbled for the door-handle. The acute silence of the unhappy filled the room: John rose, collided clumsily with the table and approached the hearth. "Now, what did you do that for?" he said. "I can't stomach these family affairs." Helen smoothed her forehead and subdued the tragedy in her eyes. "I had to do it," she breathed. "It was true, wasn't it?" She looked at Rupert, but he was looking at the fire. "True, yes," said John, "but it does Miriam no harm. A little opposition--" "No," said Helen, "no. We don't want to drive her to--to being silly." "She is silly," John said. "No," Helen said again. "She ought not to live here, that's all." "She'll have to learn to. Anyhow"--he put his hands into his pockets--"we can't have Notya looking like that. It's--it won't do." "It's quite easy not to hurt people," Helen murmured; "but you had to hurt her yourself, John, about your gardening." "That was different," he said. He was a masculine creature. "I was fighting for existence." "Miriam has an existence, too, you know," Rupert said. From the other side of the hall there came a faint chink of plates and Miriam's low voice singing. "She's all right," John assured himself. Helen was smiling tenderly at the sound. "But I wonder why Notya is so hard on her," she sighed. Rupert knocked his pipe against the fender. "I should be very glad to know what our mother was like," he said. Long ago, out of excess of loyalty, the Canipers had tacitly agreed not to discuss those matters on which their stepmother was determinedly reserved, and now a certain tightening of the atmosphere revealed the fact that John and Helen were controlling their desires to ask Rupert what he meant. CHAPTER III