After this she went down-stairs to practise her scales as usual, only very quietly and carefully, with no unnecessary faults. Things soon fell into their old channel, and, as she had anticipated, Helen had a good many small persecutions to endure, although Mrs. Desmond carefully avoided any open conflict with her stepdaughter. And in one way things were never so bad with Helen again after that memorable evening, for she never again doubted her father's love, and, as Cousin Mary had said, love makes so many things easy.
CHAPTER IV.
STRANGERS YET.
Spring did not fulfil its early promise that year. Those few warm days were followed by long weeks of bitter east wind, during which the tender green leaves grew dark and shrivelled, whilst even the daffodils and primroses that were hawked about the streets had a pinched, careworn look, as though their whole existence had been a struggle.
It almost seemed as though the east wind had penetrated inside the comfortable house in Bloomsbury Square, and had poisoned that tranquil atmosphere. Helen was no longer the only discordant element there. Mrs. Desmond, whose calm boast it had always hitherto been that she never allowed herself to be influenced by weather, suddenly developed mysterious pains in her head which her doctor declared to be neuralgia.
"The result of worry, I suppose?" suggested Mrs. Desmond with a mental reference to Helen.
"No doubt, no doubt," he returned indifferently, for he could not imagine that this patient's worries were very serious ones; "no doubt. Ladies will worry, you know. You want tone, plenty of strong nourishment, and a change in the wind, that will soon set you up."
The good doctor sighed a little as he walked down-stairs. It was so easy to order good nourishment for the mistress of this luxurious house where there was such absolute certainty that he would be obeyed. There were other houses distant not five minutes' walk, where the very words were a mockery. Suddenly he stopped. An idea had occurred to him, and he ran back.
"By the way," he said, re-opening the drawing-room door, "I am just going on to see a poor woman who is suffering much in the same way as yourself. She keeps herself and six children by her needle, poor soul. A few glasses of port wine—"