"Yes; it's a great success—the hit of the season."
"I suppose your father and Nan have been good friends—literary interests in common, and all that?"
"Of course," Phil answered, uncomfortable under this seemingly indifferent questioning.
"I have read the story. There are pages in it that are like your father. I suppose, seeing so much of each other, they naturally talked it over—a sort of collaboration?"
The question required an answer, and Phil shrank from answering. Closeted with her mother she was reluctant to confess how close had been the relationship between her father and Nan Bartlett. Her mind worked quickly. She was outspokenly truthful by habit; but she was a loyal soul, too. She decided that she could answer her mother's question without violating her father's confidence as to his feelings toward Nan. That was all over now; her father had told her so in a word. Lois hummed, picking bits of lint from her skirt while Phil deliberated.
"Father did help with it. I suppose he even wrote part of it, but nobody need know that. Daddy doesn't mean to go in for writing; he says the very suspicion that he's literary would hurt him in the law."
"I suppose he helped on the book just to get Nan interested. Now that she's launched as a writer, he drops out of the combination."
"Something like that. Daddy is very busy, you know."
Phil entertained views of her own as to the cause of her father's sudden awakening. She was sure that his interest in Nan was the inspiration of it, quite as much as alarm at the low ebb of his fortunes. In the general confusion into which the world had been plunged, Phil groped in the dark along unfamiliar walls. It was a grim fate that flung her back and forth between father and mother, a shuttle playing across the broken, tangled threads of their lives. She started suddenly as a new thought struck her. Perhaps behind this seemingly inadvertent questioning lay some deeper interest. Suddenly the rose light of romance touched the situation. Phil looked at Lois guardedly. What if—? With an accession of feeling she flung herself at her mother's knees and took her hands.
"Could you and daddy ever make it up? Could you do that now, after all these years?" she asked earnestly.