“Yes,” she said. “I will not give up Frank, but I will put it all off till next May. Of course, if he wishes, he is absolutely free.”
“Ah,” said Aunt Susan, gently. “It is likely he would wish that, I suppose.”
Helen laughed.
“Well, no; not very. But till then I shall live at home, if father will let me, and try in every way to please him.”
Her voice trembled a little.
“And I hope he will accept that,” she said. “And I hope he will be good to me and forgive me.”
Lady Susan stroked her hair in silence a moment.
“You have chosen right, dear,” she said.
CHAPTER IX
Helen was sitting again at the deal table in the “Room,” trying to balance the accounts of the quarter. A money-box, cheap but not strong, probably made in Germany, with a florid ornament of tin tacked on round its maw, stood open by her left hand, and on the table was a heap of money, consisting chiefly of pennies and small silver coins,—the subscription to the “Room” being threepence a quarter,—while by her right hand was a pile of equally mean bills, chiefly ending with a halfpenny, for brown holland, cotton, slate-pencils, needles, and gum. There was a discrepancy somewhere of ninepence, but add and subtract as she would, that ninepence held its ground like the remnant of the Old Guard. Had it been only deficit, the remedy from her own pocket would have been easy, but, unfortunately, there was ninepence too much, and, though her conscience would not have made any protest at her supplying it, it did not permit her either to pocket it or to forge a non-existent bill. And all the time her natural impatience, mixed luckily with a certain sense of humour, said to her, “Is it possible to conceive a less profitable way of wasting time than in trying to make ninepence vanish?” Her father, however, with the attention to detail which was so marked a characteristic of his, always looked over the accounts afterwards, and whether there was a discrepancy of a thousand pounds or a penny it made no difference, the principle of admitting discrepancy was equally dangerous in either case.