"The explanation is perfectly simple," Dorothy began. "I was speaking to your mother, not to you. The money is hers." "Precisely," said his daughter, "and that is the explanation." "Dearest child," Mrs. Caffyn implored her, "don't aggravate dear father. We must admit that we were both very much in the wrong, particularly myself." "Not at all," said Dorothy, quickly cutting short her father's sigh of satisfaction at the admission. "Not at all. We were both absolutely in the right. The transaction was a purely business one. Mother has allowed me twenty-five pounds a year since my seventeenth birthday." "Mother has allowed you?" echoed Mr. Caffyn. "Even if we grant that this sum was technically paid out of your mother's income, you must understand that it should be considered as coming from me--from me, your father." "You and mother can settle that afterward. It doesn't invalidate my argument, which is that such a lump sum is likely to be more useful to me at the beginning of my career on the stage than an annual pittance--" "Pittance?" repeated Mr. Caffyn, aghast. "Do you call twenty-five pounds a pittance?" "Please don't go on interrupting me," said Dorothy, coldly. "I'm now doing a calculation in my head. Twenty-five pounds a year is five per cent.--" "Five per cent.!" shouted Mr. Caffyn. "Your mother was only getting three and a half per cent." "Oh, please don't interrupt," Dorothy begged, "because this is getting very complicated. In that case mother owes me, roughly, about another two hundred and fifty pounds. However, we'll let that pass. You are both released from all responsibility for me, and if you both live more than twenty years longer you will actually be making twenty-five pounds a year out of this arrangement. In twenty years you'll be sixty-eight, won't you? Well, there's no reason why you shouldn't live to seventy-two, and if you do you'll make one hundred pounds out of me. So I don't think you can grumble." "Dear child," sobbed Mrs. Caffyn, "I don't think it's very polite, and it certainly isn't kind, to talk about poor father's age like that. Let's admit we both did wrong and ask him to forgive us." "I am not going into the question of right and wrong," replied Dorothy, loftily. "It's quite obvious to me that you have a perfect right to do what you like with your own money and that I have a perfect right to avail myself of your kindness. Father's extraordinary behavior has made it equally clear to me that I can't possibly stay on in this house; in any case, the noise the children make in the morning will end by driving me away, and the sooner I go the better." "I forbid you to speak to your parents like that," said Mr. Caffyn. Dorothy could not help laughing at his authority, and he played his last card: "Do you realize that you are not yet of age and that if I choose I can compel you to remain at home?"