She looked up at her father as she spoke. He was standing close to her--a short, gray-whiskered man, insignificant in face and features except for those wonderful eyes. In his hand, the hand which by a stroke of the pen, a signing of the name, could set in motion the force of millions, was a little silver paper-knife which she had once given him. Even now, as she knew--for he had said he could only give her five minutes after lunch--there were waiting for him a hundred schemes to be considered, a hundred more levers to move the world 'as he chose. But he stood there, waiting with a woman's infinite patience for any impulse towards confidence she-might feel--just a tender, solicitous father, grasping in his hand a daughter's insignificant gift. 'We have always been chums, Amelie,' he said, with a sort of appealing wistfulness. 'When you were quite little, you always used to bring me your little worries for us to smooth out together. I used to be pretty smart at it; I used to be devilish proud of the way I could take the frown out of your little forehead.' She held out her hand to him. 'You are an old darling,' she said, with unshed tears springing to her eyes. 'But I tell you this truth: it is only I who have been worrying. I have been imagining all sorts of things, so that I have got to believe them. That is the matter with me.' 'You have heard nothing specific?' he asked. Again that question arrested her, awoke her imaginings, and she made up her mind on what had long been a pondered idea. She got up at once. 'Nothing whatever,' she said, with a resumption of her usual manner. 'Now I am going. Take care of yourself, papa darling, and wake this sleepy old county up. I adore its sleepiness myself, and I know you can never rouse it, otherwise I should not suggest it.' The carriage was waiting for her, and she got briskly in. 'Mrs. Emsworth's,' she said to the footman. As she drove there, she tried to stifle thought, for she knew that her design was to confirm or dispel a suspicion that should never have been hers. She was doing a thing which was based on a wrong done to her husband in thought. That she knew, but she combated it by saying to herself. 'What if it is true?' She found Mrs. Emsworth at home and delighted to see her, and for a little they just interchanged the generalities which, between two people who have not seen each other for some time, are the necessary ushers to real talk. The day was very hot, and Dorothy, catlike, basked and purred in it. There was something rather _décolleté_ about her appearance, and something in her general atmosphere was equally so. She was, in fact, very different, so she struck Amelie, from the woman who told the gardener's son the fairy-story on the dewy lawn at Long Island.