"But I haven't been alone the whole evening," she returned quietly. "Mr. Aldrich called."
Mrs. Bosworth hopelessly lifted her shoulders, whose fulness her fifty-odd years had not impaired. "What'll your help-the-poor ideas make you do next!" she cried. "Think of giving up Melba to be bored a whole evening by an East Side protégé! And such a lot of your friends came to our box, too. Mr. Allen was very disappointed."
"It seems to me, too, Helen," said her father who stood with his back to the fire, "that you're carrying your philanthropy a little too far in having your brands-snatched-from-the-burning so much at the house."
Helen did not answer.
"Well, I suppose you must find some satisfaction in it or you wouldn't do it," Mrs. Bosworth sighed. "Good night, dear."
They kissed again, perfunctorily. Helen liked her aunt in that moderate way in which we all like good-natured, fate-made intimates whose interests touch our own at few points. And Mrs. Bosworth's complacent good-nature there was no denying—even if her interest did pause, way-worn, after it had journeyed out as far as those remote people who had only twenty-five thousand a year.
"Don't sit too long," said her father, bending down. During the last four weeks she had tried to wear before her father an unchanged manner. So she now met his lips with her own. "Only a few minutes longer; good night," she said.
When they had gone her gaze returned to the fire, and her mind gathered about her father. Since she had learned he was a great highwayman whose plunderings were so large as to be respectable, her days and nights had been filled with thoughts of him, and of her relation to him and his fortune. She realised that if he were seen by the world as he actually was, and if the world had the same courage to condemn large thefts that it had to condemn small thefts, he would be dishonoured far below David. She realised that his great fortune was founded on theft, that the food she ate, the dresses she wore, the house she lived in, were paid for with money that was rightly others!
What should she do?—for almost a month that question had hardly left her: Should she beg her father to change his business ways, and to restore his money to whom he had defrauded? She knew the power was not in her, nor any other, to change him. Since he was going to continue gathering in other people's money with his own, should she keep silent and remain by him, and see that the money was spent in service of the people? Or should she, refusing to live on dishonest income, withdraw from his house and shape her own life?
She came out of her thoughts with a start to find herself shivering, the bronze clock on the mantel pointing at two, and the glowing romance in the fire-place cooled to gray ashes. When she reached her sitting-room she remembered a yellow photograph of David that on the day he had confessed his guilt she had tried to burn, and which she had since tried to forget, but which she had often taken from its hiding-place and gazed at in pained wonderment. She took this out of the drawer of her writing desk, went into her bedroom and set it upon the reading-table beside her bed. After preparing herself for sleep she lit the candles on the table, turned out the gas, and lying with her head high up on the pillows she looked with glowing eyes on the open boyish face. After a time she reached a white arm for the picture, pressed a kiss upon its yellowed lips, then snuffed the candle and held the picture against her heart; and, lying so, she presently drifted softly away into sleep.