While this question was asking itself her father entered, and with him her Aunt Caroline--in an ermine-lined opera cloak and a rustling cream-lace gown, about her plump throat a collar of pearls and in her gray hair a constellation of diamonds. "Why, Helen, sitting here all alone, and at one o'clock!" her aunt cried. "Well, at any rate it means you're feeling better." Helen had had her dinner brought to her sitting-room, and had excused herself from the opera on the plea of indisposition. Helen returned the kiss with which her aunt, bending over, lightly touched her cheek. She would have preferred to say nothing of David's visit, but she knew her aunt, who had charge of the servants, would doubtless learn of it on the morrow from the housekeeper. "But I haven't been alone the whole evening," she returned quietly. "Mr. Aldrich called." Mrs. Bosworth hopelessly lifted her shoulders, whose fulness her fifty-odd years had not impaired. "What'll your help-the-poor ideas make you do next!" she cried. "Think of giving up Melba to be bored a whole evening by an East Side protégé! And such a lot of your friends came to our box, too. Mr. Allen was very disappointed." "It seems to me, too, Helen," said her father who stood with his back to the fire, "that you're carrying your philanthropy a little too far in having your brands-snatched-from-the-burning so much at the house." Helen did not answer. "Well, I suppose you must find some satisfaction in it or you wouldn't do it," Mrs. Bosworth sighed. "Good night, dear." They kissed again, perfunctorily. Helen liked her aunt in that moderate way in which we all like good-natured, fate-made intimates whose interests touch our own at few points. And Mrs. Bosworth's complacent good-nature there was no denying--even if her interest did pause, way-worn, after it had journeyed out as far as those remote people who had only twenty-five thousand a year. "Don't sit too long," said her father, bending down. During the last four weeks she had tried to wear before her father an unchanged manner. So she now met his lips with her own. "Only a few minutes longer; good night," she said. When they had gone her gaze returned to the fire, and her mind gathered about her father. Since she had learned he was a great highwayman whose plunderings were so large as to be respectable, her days and nights had been filled with thoughts of him, and of her relation to him and his fortune. She realised that if he were seen by the world as he actually was, and if the world had the same courage to condemn large thefts that it had to condemn small thefts, he would be dishonoured far below David. She realised that his great fortune was founded on theft, that the food she ate, the dresses she wore, the house she lived in, were paid for with money that was rightly others!