On the night before Christmas there was a telegram from my father. The trouble had been successfully located in the commercial acid; there was no doubt that with pure acid the trouble of manufacturing would be cleared up. More good news was to come next morning. There was a letter from Deep Harbor containing a present of one hundred dollars for Helen, as well as the announcement that her father purposed, from this time forth, to give his daughter one hundred dollars a month pocket money.
"Ted, Ted!" she cried, pouring her letter and its contents into my lap, her eyes dancing, "we can get all the books we want! See here! And we'll have five more pounds of our own to spend on our week-ends."
Curiously enough, it did not cross the mind of either of us that we could possibly have any other use for that money. Perhaps we had been badly brought up, both of us--I don't know. At any rate we always had a lot of fun out of our extravagance. And on this morning, as soon as we could get there, we furiously rang the doorbell of the bookshop, in spite of the closed shutters. We knew we could rout the old codger, the owner, out, if we made noise enough, for he lived over his shop. He grumbled at first; then, when he found us equipped to buy, cheerfully let us in. No, we did not spend all of the twenty pounds, but we made a good hole in that, too. He had a rather good _Memoirs of Charles Matthews_, extra-illustrated. It was a new kind of pleasure for us to own such a wanton luxury as that.
A day or two after Boxing Day we returned to London. Going up in the train, I said: "Well, Lady Grey Eyes, the second Christmas didn't turn out so black as we'd painted it, did it?" Helen simply looked things at me.
"They'll all be as wonderful as this one, dear," I added, Helen's eyes clouded. "Don't say it, Ted! Don't!" and she touched the wood of the railway carriage beside her. We were alone in the compartment, so my reply may be imagined.
It was some time in the spring that a trained nurse came to live with us in the little house in Kensington. Her advent set the whole household bustling over the preparations for the expected arrival of Edward Jevons, Jr. It was my mother who insisted upon Helen's having a nurse, long before the day was due, although she still maintained her attitude of being officially polite to Helen and almost ignoring my existence. I had not yet atoned for my fatal attempt at setting matters right. Things were going swimmingly at the factory. I was naturally busy enough, for I had to train the whole staff, with the result that production was not yet on a large scale. But what we were making was right, orders were coming in, and every week I was able to report increased production. Chitty was one smile as he watched me whistling at my work.