"But if we left Harry with her he'd starve and she'd leave him in a week." "Let him starve," Sylvia cried. "He deserves to starve." "You hard-hearted little devil," Monkley said. "After all, he is your father." "That's what makes me hate him," Sylvia declared. "He's no right to be my father. He's no right to make me think like that of him. He must be wrong to make me feel as I do about him." Monkley came close and took her hand. "Do you mean what you said about leaving them and going away with me?" Sylvia looked at him, and, meeting his eyes, she shook her head. "No, of course I don't really mean it, but why can't you think of some way to stop all this? Why should we put up with it any longer? Make him turn her out into the street." Monkley laughed. "You _are_ very young, aren't you? Though I've thought once or twice lately that you seemed to be growing up." Again Sylvia caught his eyes and felt a little afraid, not really afraid, she said to herself, but uneasy, as if somebody she could not see had suddenly opened a door behind her. "Don't let's talk about me, anyway," she said. "Think of something to change things here." "I'd thought of a concert-party this summer. Pierrots, you know. How d'ye think your father would do as a pierrot? He might be very funny if she'd let him be funny." Sylvia clapped her hands. "Oh, Jimmy, it would be such fun!" "You wouldn't mind if she came too?" "I'd rather she didn't," Sylvia said. "But it would be different, somehow. We shouldn't be shut up with her as we are here. I'll be able to sing, won't I?" "That was my idea." Before Henry met Mabel he would have had a great deal to say about this concert-party; now he accepted Monkley's announcement with a dull equanimity that settled Sylvia. He received the news that he would become a pierrot just as he had received the news that, his nightgown not having been sent back that week by the laundress, he would have to continue with the one he was wearing.