"Ah yes! Well, Jones and I were going into the details of your investments, and I was just calculating what would be the amount of your extra income should I consent to your investing your capital in accordance with the advice of the Archdeacon of Brismouth, when Jones, who I may remark en passant has been a friend of mine for twenty years and should know better, calmly informs me that without consulting your husband you have withdrawn five hundred pounds from your capital in order to fling it away upon your daughter. I thought he was perpetrating a stupid joke; but he actually showed me a record of this abominable transaction, and I had no alternative but to accept his word. I need hardly say that any chance I might have had of finishing off my work at the society vanished as far as this afternoon was concerned, and so"—here Mr. Caffyn became bitterly ironical—"I ventured to permit myself the luxury of a hansom-cab from the offices of your bank to the corner of Carlington Road, where the four-mile circle of fares terminates, and now, if you please, I should like an explanation of this outrage."
"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.—"