idly up and down,
as if my self-appointed daughter were dancing for joy!

"Can I trust my own senses?" said Mrs. Van Brandt. "Is it really Mr.
Germaine?"

"How do you do, new papa?" cried the child. "Push open the big door and
come in. I want to kiss you."

There was a world of difference between the coldly doubtful tone of the
mother and the joyous greeting of the child. Had I forced myself too
suddenly on Mrs. Van Brandt? Like all sensitively organized persons, she
possessed that inbred sense of self-respect which is pride under another
name. Was her pride wounded at the bare idea of my seeing her, deserted
as well as deceived--abandoned contemptuously, a helpless burden on
strangers--by the man for whom she had sacrificed and suffered so much?
And that man a thief, flying from the employers whom he had cheated! I
pushed open the heavy oaken street-door, fearing that this might be the
true explanation of the change which I had already remarked in her. My
apprehensions were confirmed when she unlocked the inner door, leading
from the courtyard to the sitting-room, and let me in.

As I took her by both hands and kissed her, she turned her head, so that
my lips touched her cheek only. She flushed deeply; her eyes looked away
from me as she spoke her few formal words of welcome. When the child
flew into my arms, she cried out, irritably, "Don't trouble Mr.
Germaine!" I took a chair, with the little one on my knee. Mrs. Van
Brandt seated herself at a distance from me. "It is needless, I suppose,
to ask you if you know what has happened," she said, turning pale
again as suddenly as she had turned red, and keeping her eyes fixed
obstinately on the floor.

Before I could answer, the child burst out with the news of her father's
disappearance in these words:

"My other papa has run away! My other papa has stolen money! It's time I
had a new one, isn't it?" She put her arms round my neck. "And now I've
got him!" she cried, at the shrillest pitch of her voice.

The mother looked at us. For a while, the proud, sensitive woman
struggled successfully with herself; but the pang that wrung her was not
to be endured in silence. With a low cry of pain, she hid her face in
her hands. Overwhelmed by the sense of her own degradation, she was even
ashamed to let the man who loved her see that she was in tears.

I took the child off my knee. There was a second door in the
sitting-room, which happened to be left open. It showed me a