"Please don't let us have a tirade," he said "I thought it would be more convenient for you. That's always the way with your sex, Helena, you do a thing to help them out, and they burst into tears." "I haven't burst into tears," she said sullenly, "but I won't go." "Come, now! don't be a goose. I wouldn't make a practice of accepting their invitations; but for once, what does it matter?" "Can't you understand?" she said passionately; "_they are kind to me!_" She turned quickly and ran into the garden, leaving him to call after her: "Well, you've got to go to-night, because I've accepted." "I won't go to-night!" she flung back, her voice breaking. Lloyd Pryor shook his head. "And she wonders I don't come oftener," he said to himself. So the sleepy Sunday morning passed. Mr. Pryor roamed about the garden, looking furtively over his shoulder now and then--but Helena had disappeared. "Sulking in her room, I suppose," he thought. He had come at some inconvenience, to spend Sunday and talk over this project of the child, "for I'd like to see her happier," he told himself; and now, instead of sitting down, sensibly, to discuss things, she flared out over this invitation to supper. Her intensity fatigued him. "I must be getting old," he ruminated, "and Helena will always be the age she was ten years ago. Ten? It's thirteen! How time flies; she was twenty. How interested I was in Frederick's health in those days!" He stretched himself out on the bench under the poplar, and lit another cigar. "If _I'm_ willing to go, why is she so exercised? Women are all alike--except Alice." He smiled as he thought of his girl, and instantly the hardness in his face lifted, as a cloud shadow lifts and leaves sunshine behind it. Then some obscure sense of fitness made him pull himself together, and put his mind on affairs that had nothing in common with Helena; affairs in which he could include his girl without offending his taste.