“Do they all love you?” she said.

“Oh, no, not at all.  Some of them think I’m horrid.  Some of them forget me altogether, and then I never come back, until just at the end.  Some of them only want me when they’re in trouble.  Some, very soon, think it silly to believe in me at all, and the older they grow the less they believe, generally.  And when I do come they won’t see me, they make up their minds not to.  But I’m always there just the same; it makes no difference what they do.  They can’t help themselves.  Only it’s better for them just to remember me a little, because then it’s much safer for them.  You’ve been feeling rather lonely lately, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she said.  “It’s stupid now all by myself.  There’s nobody to ask questions of.”

“Well, there’s somebody else in your house who’s lonely.”

“Is there?” She couldn’t think of any one.

“Yes.  Your father.”

“Oh!  Father——­” She was uninterested.

“Yes.  You see, if he isn’t——­” and then, at that, he was gone, she was alone and fast asleep.

In the morning when she awoke, she remembered it all quite clearly, but, of course, it had all been a dream.  “Such a funny dream,” she told her nurse, but she would give out no details.

“Some food she’s been eating,” said her nurse.

Nevertheless, when, on that afternoon, coming in from her walk, she met her dark, grubby little father in the hall, she did stay for a moment on the bottom step of the stairs to consider him.

“I’ve been for a walk, daddy,” she said, and then, rather frightened at her boldness, tumbled up on the next step.  He went forward to catch her.

“Hold up,” he said, held her for a moment, and then hurried, confused and rather agitated, into his dark sanctum.  These were, very nearly, the first words that they had ever, in the course of their lives together, interchanged.  Munty Ross was uneasy with grown-up persons (unless he was discussing business with them), but that discomfort was nothing to the uneasiness that he felt with children.  Little girls (who certainly looked at him as though he were an ogre) frightened him quite horribly; moreover, Mrs. Munty had, for a great number of years, pursued a policy with regard to her husband that was not calculated to make him bright and easy in any society.  “Poor old Munty,” she would say to her friends, “it’s not all his fault——­” It was, as a fact, very largely hers.  He had never been an eloquent man, but her playful derision of his uncouthness slew any little seeds of polite conversation that might, under happier conditions, have grown into brilliant blossom.  It had been understood from the very beginning that Nancy was not of her father’s world.  He would have been scarcely aware that he had a daughter had he not, at certain periods, paid bills for her clothes.

“What’s a child want with all this?” he had ventured once to say.