“How are you feeling, father?  Are you well?”

“I am about the same as when you went away, dear,” Harry replied, and that expression of stern, almost ineffable patience deepened on his face.  He smiled directly, however, and asked Evelyn what train her mother had taken.

“She won’t be home until the seven-thirty train,” said Harry, “and there is no use in our waiting dinner.  You must be hungry, Maria.  Evelyn, darling, speak to Irene.  I hear her in the dining-room.”

Evelyn obeyed, and Harry gave his orders that dinner should be served as soon as possible.  The girl smiled at him with a coquettish air.

“Irene is pleasanter to papa than to anybody else,” Evelyn observed, meditatively, when Irene had gone out.  “I guess girls are apt to be pleasanter to gentlemen than to little girls.”

Harry laughed and kissed the child’s high forehead.  “Little girls are just as well off if they don’t study out other people’s peculiarities too much,” he said.

“They are very interesting,” said Evelyn, with an odd look at him, yet an entirely innocent look.

Maria was secretly glad that this first evening She was not there, that she could dine alone with her father and Evelyn.  It was a drop of comfort, and yet the awful knell never ceased ringing in her ears—­“Father is going to die, father is going to die.”  Maria made an effort to eat, because her father watched her anxiously.

“You are not as stout as you were when you went away, precious,” he said.

“I am perfectly well,” said Maria.

“Well, I must say you do look well,” said Harry, looking admiringly at her.  He admired his little Evelyn, but no other face in the world upon which he was soon to close his eyes forever was quite so beautiful to him as Maria’s.  “You look very much as your own mother used to do,” he said.

“Was Maria’s mamma prettier than my mamma?” asked Evelyn, calmly, without the least jealousy.  She looked scrutinizingly at Maria, then at her father.  “I think Maria is a good deal prettier than mamma, and I suppose, of course, her mamma must have been better-looking than mine,” said she, answering her own question, to Harry’s relief.  But she straightway followed one embarrassing question with another.  “Did you love Maria’s mamma better than you do my mamma?” she asked.

Maria came to her father’s relief.  “That is not a question for little girls to ask, dear,” said she.

“I don’t see why,” said Evelyn.  “Little girls ought to know things.  I supposed that was why I was a little girl, in order to learn to know everything.  I should have been born grown up if it hadn’t been for that.”

“But you must not ask such questions, precious,” said Maria.  “When you are grown up you will see why.”

Harry insisted upon Evelyn’s going to bed directly after dinner, although she pleaded hard to be allowed to sit up until her mother returned.  Harry wished for at least a few moments alone with Maria.  So Evelyn went off up-stairs, after teary kisses and good-nights, and Maria was left alone with her father in the parlor.