Just as it needed a trained eye to discern the possibilities of beauty possessed by Helen, so it required some loving knowledge of young natures to divine the latent good in her. Resentful, passionate, and wayward, she was also deeply affectionate, and her passionate outbreaks were followed by passionate repentance, a repentance that she expressed, however, only to her father, and, as the months went by, rarely even to him; for although his manner towards her was always kind and even loving, she knew, with the unerring instinct of childhood, that his affection was already to a certain extent alienated from her. She did not blame him for this. In her loyal little heart he still reigned supreme, as a being absolutely perfect and noble. It was on her stepmother's unconscious head that all the vials of Helen's wrath were poured. More or less cowed into outward submission, and half broken-spirited by her monotonous life, she hated Mrs. Desmond with a hatred that bade fair to poison her whole nature. To succeed in visibly annoying her stepmother, to bring an angry cloud over her calm face, was a positive pleasure to Helen. Mrs. Desmond had been accustomed to a well-ordered household, and any domestic disturbance was extremely annoying to her. Helen soon discovered this, and although she was supposed not to speak to any member of the household, with the exception of the maid, she delighted in surreptitious visits to the kitchen, and in setting the servants by the ears. Then, again, noises of any kind were Mrs. Desmond's abhorrence. Helen would purposely bang doors, tap with her feet on the floor, even scrape a knife on her plate at luncheon, and feel more than repaid for the sharp reproof which she drew upon herself by watching her stepmother's agonized expression whilst the torture was in progress. That these things were done purposely Mrs. Desmond did not guess, any more than she imagined that the passionate manifestations of affection for her father in which Helen occasionally indulged, were evidences of real love.