“Papa gets tired of loving me,” she had said to Nurse last night with a quivering of the lip.

“Papa is very sick,” Nurse had answered guardedly, “and he had letters to-day that were too much for him.”

“Then he shouldn’t have letters,” said the child, decidedly.  “I’ll tell him so to-morrow.”

As she danced about, her white dress and sunny curls gleaming in and out among the heliotrope and scarlet geranium that one of the flower-loving boarders was cultivating, her father called her name; it was a queer name, and she did not like it.  She liked her second name, Prudence, better.  But Nurse had said, when she complained to her, that the girls would call her “Prudy” for short, and “Jerrie” was certainly a prettier name than that.

“Jerrie,” her father called.

The sound was so weak and broken by a cough that she did not turn her head or answer until he had called more than twice.  But she flew to him when she was sure that he had called her, and kissed his flabby cheek and smoothed back the thin locks of white hair.  His black eyes were burning like two fires beneath his white brows, his lips were ashy, and his breath hot and hurried.  Two letters were trembling in his hand, two open letters, and one of them was in several fluttering sheets; this handwriting was a lady’s, Jeroma recognized that, although she could not read even her own name in script.

“O, papa, those are the letters that made you sick!  I’ll throw them away to the lions,” she cried, trying to snatch them.  But he kept them in his fingers and tried to speak.

“I’ll be rested in a moment, eat those strawberries—­and then I have—­something to talk to you about.”

She surveyed the table critically, bread and fruit and milk; there was nothing beside.

“I’ve had my breakfast!  O, papa, I’ve forgotten your flowers!  Mrs. Heath said you might have them every morning.”

“Run and get them then, and never wait for me to call you—­it tires me too much.”

“Poor papa!  And I can howl almost as loud as the lions themselves.”

“Don’t howl at me then, for I might want to roll off into the sea,” he said, smiling as she danced away.

The child seemed never to walk, she was always frisking about, one hardly knew if her feet touched the ground.

“Poor child! happy child,” he groaned, rather than murmured, as she disappeared around the corner of the veranda.  She was a chubby, roundfaced child, with great brown eyes and curls like yellow floss; from her childishness and ignorance of what children at ten years of age are usually taught, she was supposed by strangers to be no more than eight years of age; she was an imperious little lady, impetuous, untrained, self-reliant, and, from much intercourse with strangers, not at all shy, looking out upon the world with confiding eyes, and knowing nothing to be afraid of or ashamed of.  Nurse had been her only teacher; she could barely read a chapter in the New Testament, and when her father gave her ten cents and then five more she could not tell him how many cents she held in her hand.