“Hardly your business, my dear,” his wife had told him.  “The child’s clothes are marvellously cheap considering.  I don’t know how Florice does it for the money.”  He resented nothing—­it was not his way—­but he did feel, deep down in his heart, that the child was over-dressed, that it must be bad for any little girl to be praised in the way that his daughter was praised, that “the kid will grow up with the most tremendous ideas.”

He resented it, perhaps a little, that his young daughter had so easily accustomed herself to the thought that she had no father.  “She might just want to see me occasionally.  But I’d only frighten her, I suppose, if she did.”

Munty Ross had very little of the sentimentalist about him; he was completely cynical about the value of the human heart, and believed in the worth and goodness of no one at all.  He had, for a brief wild moment, been in love with his wife, but she had taken care to kill that, “the earlier the better.”  “My dear,” she would say to a chosen friend, “what Munty’s like when he’s romantic!” She never, after the first month of their married life together, caught a glimpse of that side of him.

Now, however, he did permit his mind to linger over that vision of his little daughter tumbling on the stairs.  He wondered what had made her do it.  He was astonished at the difference that it made to him.

To Nancy also it had made a great difference.  She wished that she had stayed there on the stairs a little longer to hold a more important conversation.  She had thought of her father as “all horrid”—­now his very contrast to her little world pleased and interested her.  It may also be that, although she was young, she had even now a picture in her mind of her father’s loneliness.  She may have seen into her mother’s attitude with an acuteness much older than her actual years.

She thought now continually about her father.  She made little plans to meet him, but these meetings were not, as a rule, successful, because so often he was down in the city.  She would wait at the end of her afternoon walk on the stairs.

“Come along, Miss Nancy, do.  What are you hanging about there for?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ll be disturbing your mother.”

“Just a minute.”

She peered anxiously, her little head almost held by the railings of the banisters; she gazed down into black, mysterious depths wherein her father might be hidden.  She was driven to all this partly by some real affection that had hitherto found no outlet, partly by a desire for adventure, but partly, also, by some force that was behind her and quite recognised by her.  It was as though she said:  “If I’m nice to my father and make friends with him, then you must promise that I shan’t be frightened in the middle of the night, that the clock won’t tick too loudly, that the blind won’t flap, that it won’t all be too dark and dreadful.”  She knew that she had made this compact.