He watched her disappearing up the stairs, stood for a moment irresolute, and then went into the library. He knew he had offended her and he knew exactly how he had offended her. There are silences that can be more hurting than speech--yet what could he have said? He rummaged in his mind to find something he might have said and could find nothing more appropriate than a remark about the weather and the fineness of the night. Yet a bald and decrepit remark like that would have been as bad almost as silence, for it would have ignored the main point at issue--the night-wandering of his ward. He sat down again for a moment in the armchair by the fireplace and began to wrestle with the position in which he found himself. This was a small business, but if Phyl in the future was to do things that he did not approve of it would be his plain duty to remonstrate with her. An odious position for youth to be placed in. How she would loathe and hate him! Pinckney, though a man of the world in many ways and a good business man, was still at heart a boy just as young as Phyl; even in years he was very little older than she, and the boy side of his mind was in full revolt at the job set before him by fate. Then he came to a resolution. "She can do jolly well what she pleases," said he to himself, "without my interference. Aunt Maria can attend to that. My business will be to look after her property and keep sharks off it. _I'm_ not going to set up in business to tell a girl what she ought or oughtn't to do--that's a woman's job." Satisfied with this seeming solution of the difficulty he went to bed. Meanwhile, Phyl, having marched off with the book under her arm found, when she reached her room, that she had forgotten a matchbox, and, too proud to return to the hall for one, went to bed in the dark. She lay awake for an hour, her mind obsessed by thoughts of this man who had suddenly stepped into her life, and who possessed such a strange power to disturb her being and fill it with feelings of unrest, irritation and, strangely enough, a vague attraction. The attraction one might fancy the iron to feel for the distant magnet, or the floating stick for the far-off whirlpool. Then she fell asleep and dreamed that they were at dinner and Mr. Hennessey was waiting at table. Her father was there and, before the dream converted itself into something equally fatuous she heard Pinckney's voice, also in the dream; he seemed looking for her in the hall and he was calling to her, "Phyl--Phyl!" CHAPTER V Next morning came with a burst of sunshine and a windy, cloudless sky. Pinckney, dressing with his window open, could see the park with the rooks wheeling and cawing over the trees, whilst the warm wind brought into the room all sorts of winter scents on the very breath of summer.