“Well!” replied Miss Wren more seriously.  “With my second father.  Or with my first, for that matter.”  And she shook her head and drew a sigh.  “If you had known a poor child I used to have here,” she added, “you’d have understood me.  But you didn’t and you can’t.  All the better!”

“You must have been taught a long time, Miss,” said Sloppy, glancing at the array of dolls on hand, “before you came to work so neatly, Miss, and with such a pretty taste.”

“Never was taught a stitch, young man!” returned the dressmaker, tossing her head.  “Just gobbled and gobbled, till I found out how to do it.  Badly enough at first, but better now.”

“And here have I,” said Sloppy, in a self-reproachful tone, “been a-learning and a-learning at cabinet-making, ever so long!  I’ll tell you what, Miss, I should like to make you something.”

“Much obliged, but what?”

“I could make you,” said Sloppy, surveying the room, “a handy set of nests to lay the dolls in.  Or a little set of drawers to keep your silks and threads and scraps in.  Or I could turn you a rare handle for that crutch-stick, if it belongs to him you call your father.”

“It belongs to me,” said the little creature, with a quick flush of her face and neck.  “I am lame.”

Poor Sloppy flushed too, for there was an instinctive delicacy behind his buttons.  He said perhaps, the best thing in the way of amends that could be said.  “I am very glad it’s yours, because I’d rather ornament it for you than for any one else.  Please, may I look at it?”

Miss Wren was in the act of handing it over to him when she paused.  “But you had better see me use it,” she said sharply.  “This is the way.  Hoppetty, kicketty, peg-peg-peg.  Not pretty, is it?”

“It seems to me that you hardly want it at all,” said Sloppy.

The little dressmaker sat down again, and gave it into his hand, saying with that better look upon her, and with a smile: 

“Thank you!  You are a very kind young man, a really kind young man.  I accept your offer—­I suppose He won’t mind,” she added as an afterthought, shrugging her shoulders; “and if he does, he may!”

“Meaning him you call your father, Miss?” said Sloppy.

“No, no,” replied Miss Wren.  “Him, him, HIM!”

“Him, HIM, HIM?” repeated Sloppy, staring about, as if for him.

“Him who is coming to court and marry me,” returned Miss Wren.  “Dear me, how slow you are!”

“Oh!  HIM!” said Sloppy, “I never thought of him.  When is he coming, Miss?”

“What a question!” cried Miss Wren.  “How should I know?”

“Where is he coming from, Miss?”

“Why, good gracious, how can I tell!  He is coming from somewhere or other, I suppose, and he is coming some day or other, I suppose.  I don’t know any more about him, at present.”

This tickled Mr. Sloppy as an extraordinarily good joke, and he threw back his head and laughed with measureless enjoyment.  At the sight of him laughing in that absurd way, the dolls’ dressmaker laughed very heartily indeed.  So they both laughed till they were tired.