“I have no cause to complain—­of my daughter’s lessons to-day,” he said very quietly.  Then he glanced over at me again.  But I had to look away quick, or I would have laughed right out.

When he got up from the table he said to me:  “I shall expect to see you to-morrow in the library at four, Mary.”

And Mary answered, “Yes, Father,” polite and proper, as she should; but Marie inside was just chuckling with the joke of it all.

The next day I watched again at four for Father to come up the walk; and when he had come in I went down to the library.  He was there in his pet seat before the fireplace. (Father always sits before the fireplace, whether there’s a fire there or not.  And sometimes he looks so funny sitting there, staring into those gray ashes just as if it was the liveliest kind of a fire he was watching.)

As I said, he was there, but I had to speak twice before he looked up.  Then, for a minute, he stared vaguely.

“Eh?  Oh!  Ah—­er—­yes, to be sure,” he muttered then, “You have come with your books.  Yes, I remember.”

But there wasn’t any twinkle in his eyes, nor the least little bit of an understanding smile; and I was disappointed.  I had been looking for it.  I knew then, when I felt so suddenly lost and heart-achey, that I had been expecting and planning all day on that twinkly understanding smile.  You know you feel worse when you’ve just found a father and then lost him!

And I had lost him.  I knew it the minute he sighed and frowned and got up from his seat and said, oh, yes, to be sure.  He was just Dr. Anderson then—­the man who knew all about the stars, and who had been unmarried to Mother, and who called me “Mary” in an of-course-you’re-my-daughter tone of voice.

Well, he took my books and heard my lessons, and told me what I was to study next day.  He’s done that two days now.

Oh, I’m so tired of being Mary!  And I’ve got more than four whole months of it left.  I didn’t get Mother’s letter to-day.  Maybe that’s why I’m specially lonesome to-night.

* * * * *

July first.

School is done, both the regular school and my school.  Not that my school has amounted to much.  Really it hasn’t.  Oh, for three or four days he asked questions quite like just a teacher.  Then he got to talking.  Sometimes it would be about something in the lessons; sometimes it would be about a star, or the moon.  And he’d get so interested that I’d think for a minute that maybe the understanding twinkle would come into his eyes again.  But it never did.

Sometimes it wasn’t stars and moons, though, that he talked about.  It was Boston, and Mother.  Yes, he did.  He talked a lot about Mother.  As I look back at it now, I can see that he did.  He asked me all over again what she did, and about the parties and the folks that came to see her.  He asked again about Mr. Harlow, and about the concert, and the young man who played the violin, and what was his name, and how old was he, and did I like him.  And then, right in the middle of some question, or rather, right in the middle of some answer I was giving him, he would suddenly remember he was hearing my lessons, and he would say, “Come, come, Mary, what has this to do with your lessons?”