She looked from one to the other with tears in her eyes. “I have nobody in the world to tell me which is right,” said Helen. She was far beyond shedding of tears, the moisture in her eyes was a powerful concentrated dew of suffering through which her troubled eyes looked out. At this moment there came another knock at the door, a quiet little knock low down, as of a creature of small stature, sounding against the lower panels; and then a small voice called from the same altitude, “Helen, Helen, open, Helen! I tan’t open the door.” Sir John turned his face and his chair round towards the little voice, and sat there attentively expecting what was to come. Charley made one step to it and opened it, leaving the passage free. Janey appeared in the threshold in her black frock, her fair little face rising out of it like a flower, her little figure, so lightly poised, standing against the background of the panelled wall. She looked round upon them with the perfect calm of childhood. Then her eyes were caught by the pocketbook on the table. Janey was not afraid of Sir John nor of any one in the wide world. She went up to the table and took the precious case into her little hands. “This is Janey’s fortune,” she said, looking up with a smile into the face of the man beside her. “Are you doing to keep it safe for me?” He sat and looked at her, helpless; he would have knocked down any man who had seized upon it--wrested it from the most powerful claimant; but before the little child he was helpless. He gazed at her blankly, stupidly, in the height of his dismay. “I will not dive it to Sir John,” said Janey, “because he does not look kind. He does not like Helen or me; he did not like papa: but I will dive it to Charley, for he is the one that is good. Catch, Charley!” cried the little girl, throwing the precious case like a ball across the table. She clapped her hands when Ashton caught it, with a laugh of childish pleasure. A ball or a fortune, what did it matter to Janey? “And look, Helen, who is coming!” the child said. “I was sent to tell you, but I forgot. Here she is coming! she is coming! and we are all doing home to our own house, and never to cry any more.” In another moment Helen’s forlorn solitude, her helpless loneliness were over. She flew past Sir John, who rose stumbling to his feet, and Charley, who stood bewildered with Janey’s fortune in his hand, and fell into the outstretched arms of a smiling and weeping woman who had come in after Janey, at the open door.