“It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care anything about it.” The smile was slightly satirical, this time. “I’d forgotten it was Our Agnes’s night out!” Helwise looked upset, and as if she might be getting ready for another heart-attack. “I dare say there’s a tin of something somewhere, but I shouldn’t know what to do with it if there was. You’d much better let me get the Therm.--_not_ in the office, Lancelot! I meant to have had it all tidied up before you got back, but Dandy brought another crochet pattern and that was how I didn’t turn off the gas. What I mean is that I’ve been hunting through your old papers for accounts of the Lugg when it was first built. I thought it would be so interesting to have them pasted in a book now that the thing’s gone altogether, and then there’ll be all the fresh paragraphs about it, this week. I felt sure you would like to see them, but there were so many years back to look through, and the stickphast stuck such lots of other things beside the right ones. Oh, and do you know, Lancelot, there was a photograph of your father taken on the top of the Lugg, with his foot on the last spadeful, and on the right--no, left!--that poor old Whinnerah person who was drowned? Underneath they’d put: ‘Conqueror of the Sea!’ Don’t you think that it would be nice to have the photograph reproduced in this week’s paper, while everybody is so interested? People forget so soon. There might be a companion one of you, too, don’t you think, looking at one of the breaks?” “With my foot on a coffin?” Lanty’s voice, risen a little, had in it something strange and wild. He stood gazing at her with a fixed expression on his face, striving to measure the exact immensity of the gulf between them, seeing her thousand selfish follies climb out of it like mocking gnomes. He had done all he could for her, not all she wanted, perhaps, but everything within his power, and at his greatest need she gave him nothing--no, much worse than nothing--in return. In this his hour of bitterness she would drag his dead into light, holding it up to public calumny with a pot of stickphast. He closed the office door between them, and heard her burst into terrified tears on the other side. “It was his father!” she sobbed and gasped, as the girls attempted to soothe her. “It’s no use telling me it was Lancelot, because he never looked at me like that in his life. They say the dead come back sometimes, and stare at you through the children’s eyes, and I’m sure it’s true! He never liked me--the other. He always said I was silly, and I was frightened of him. I believe Lancelot is drowned, and this is his father come back in his place! No, it’s no use talking to me about eggs and bread-and-butter! If he’s a ghost, how can he eat? I won’t stay down here--no, I daren’t! He might come out again, and I should never get over it!”