Then she had several little encounters with her father.  She met him one day on the doorstep.  He had come up whilst she was standing there.

“Had a good walk?” he said nervously.  She looked at him and laughed.  Then he went hurriedly indoors.

On the second occasion she had come down to be shown off at a luncheon party.  She had been praised and petted, and then, in the hall, had run into her father’s arms.  He was in his top-hat, going down to his old city, looking, the nurse thought, “just like a monkey.”  But Nancy stayed, holding on to the leg of his trousers.  Suddenly he bent down and whispered: 

“Were they nice to you in there?”

“Yes.  Why weren’t you there?”

“I was.  I left.  Got to go and work.”

“What sort of work?”

“Making money for your clothes.”

“Take me too.”

“Would you like to come?”

“Yes.  Take me.”

He bent down and kissed her, but, suddenly hearing the voices of the luncheon-party, they separated like conspirators.  He crept out of the house.

After that there was no question of their alliance.  The sort of affection that most children feel for old, ugly, and battered dolls, Nancy now felt for her father, and the warmth of this affection melted her dried, stubborn little soul, caught her up into visions, wonders, sympathies that had seemed surely denied to her for ever.

“Now sit still, Miss Nancy, while I do up the back.”

“Oh, silly old clothes!” said Nancy.

Then one day she declared,

“I want to be dirty like those children in the garden.”

“And a nice state your mother would be in!” cried the amazed nurse.

“Father wouldn’t,” Nancy thought.  “Father wouldn’t mind.”

There came at last the wonderful day when her father penetrated into the nursery.  He arrived furtively, very much, it appeared, ashamed of himself and exceedingly shy of the nurse.  He did not remain very long.  He said very little; a funny picture he had made with his blue face, his black shiny hair, his fat little legs, and his anxious, rather stupid eyes.  He sat rather awkwardly in a chair, with Nancy on his knee; he wrung his hair for things to say.

The nurse left them for a moment alone together, and then Nancy whispered: 

“Daddy, let’s go into the gardens together, you and me; just us—­no silly old nurse—­one mornin’.” (She found the little “g” still a difficulty.)

“Would you like that?” he whispered back.  “I don’t know I’d be much good in a garden.”

“Oh, you’ll be all right,” she asserted with confidence.  “I want to dig.”

She’d made up her mind then to that.  As Hannibal determined to cross the Alps, as Napoleon set his feet towards Moscow, so did Nancy Ross resolve that she would, in the company of her father, dig in the gardens.  She stroked her father’s hand, rubbed her head upon his sleeve; exactly as she would have caressed, had she been another little girl, the damaged features of her old rag doll.  She was beginning, however, for the first time in her life, to love some one other than herself.