Helen took his arm.
“That is so good of you, Uncle Rupert,” she said; “but I think I should like to go quite away, if father will let me. I think I should like to go to Cambridge. Martin is there. And Martin is so good for one, if one is, well, not very happy.”
“Yes; that is a good plan. You can stay with Susan. My dear, I’m more sorry for you than I can tell you, and also I am as sorry for your father. You and I both know him, and we both love him, and, though we are made very differently, we know how—how splendid he is. And how big.”
“I know,” said she. “I feel that if I could only persuade myself he was narrow I should care less. But his huge, singlehearted devotion to—to God cannot possibly be called narrow.”
They walked on in silence a little.
“But that is all I can do for you, Helen,” said he. “Nobody can really help you except yourself; we can only alleviate things a bit. You have made your choice, absolutely, I gather?”
“Am I being a selfish, egotistic little brute, Uncle Rupert?” she asked.
“Not according to my view, which is that when a thing concerns you so intimately and vitally as this it is nobody else’s business. Not even your father’s,” he added.
A good deal of persuasion, as Lord Flintshire found, was needed. At first his brother would not hear of Helen’s going, for he said that her departure was shirking the situation. What made him yield was the suggestion that the situation, if not shirked, might make her really ill. And a hurried interchange of telegrams led to her arrival at Cambridge the next evening.
The expedition to-day had started rather silently, and Martin decided that, as Helen did not at present want to talk about her affairs, the best thing to do was to be completely futile, foolish, and garrulous. For years he and Helen had adopted this method of treating each other’s depression, and it was sufficient for one to say “Hump. Play the fool,” for the other to understand that until further notice he had to talk rot. This was a device, by the way, which neither had ever employed when Mr. Challoner was in a similar mood. He would probably not have understood it.