'Dear, I shall make it very plain. I am not going to let my husband put through all the danger and get through all the trouble, and then come home for me that I may enjoy all the triumph and all the comfort. If that is his idea of a woman's place, all right, but he must get some other girl to marry him. "Some girls will,"' Helena went on, breaking irreverently into a line of a song from a burlesque, '"but this girl won't!"'

'But you see, Helena,' Sir Rupert said almost peevishly, 'you don't seem to have thought of things. I don't want to be a wet blanket, or a prophet of evil omen, or any of that sort of thing; but there may be accidents, you know, and miscalculations, and failures even, and things may go wrong with this enterprise, no matter how well planned.'

'Yes, I have thought of all that. That is exactly where it is, dear.'

'Where what is, Helena?'

'Dear, where my purpose comes in. If there is going to be a failure, if there is going to be a danger to the man I love—well, I mean to be in it too. If he fails, it will cost his life; if it costs his life, I want it to cost my life too.'

'You might have thought a little of me, Helena,' her father said reproachfully. 'You might have remembered that I have no one but you.'

Helena burst into tears.

'Oh, my father, I did think of you—I do think of you always; but this crisis is beyond me and above us both. I have thought it out, and I cannot do anything else than what I am prepared to do. I have thought it over night after night, again and again—I have prayed for guidance—and I see no other way! You know,' and a smile began to show itself through her tears, 'long before I knew that he loved me I was always thinking what I ought to do, supposing he did love me! And then, papa dear, if I were to remain at home, and to marry a marquis, or an alderman, or a man from Chicago, I might get diphtheria and die, and who would be the better for that—except, perhaps, the marquis, or the alderman, or the man from Chicago?'

'Look here, Sir Rupert,' the Dictator said, 'let me tell you that at first I was not inclined to listen to this pleading of your daughter. I thought she did not understand the sacrifice she was making. But she has conquered me—she has shown me that she is in earnest—and I have caught the inspiration of her spirit and her generous self-sacrifice, and I have not the heart to resist her—I dare not refuse her. She shall come, in God's name!'