and it was not long before the day came when he began to
cherish the fancy that she knew when the time for her visit was near, and
enjoyed it when it came.

"She looks as if she did," he said to Mornin. "She wouldn't go to sleep
yesterday after I came into the room, and I'll swear I saw her eyes
following me as I walked about; and when I carried her in after she was
dressed, she turned her head over her shoulder to look round her and
smiled when she had done it and found nothing was missing. Oh! she knows
well enough when she gets in there."

The fancy was a wonderfully pleasant one to him, and when, as time went
on, she developed a bright baby habit of noticing all about her, and
expressing her pleasure in divers soft little sounds, he was a happier
man than he had ever thought to be. His greatest pleasure was the certain
knowledge that she had first noticed himself--that her first greeting had
been given to him, that her first conscious caress had been his. She was
a loving little creature, showing her affection earlier than most
children do. Before she could sit upright, she recognised his in-comings
and out-goings, and when he took her in his arms to walk to and fro with
her, as was his habit at night, she dropped her tiny head upon his
shoulders with a soft yielding to his tenderness which never failed to
quicken the beatings of his heart.

"There's something in her face," he used to say to himself, "something
that's not in every child's face. It's a look about her eyes and mouth
that seems to tell a man that she understands him--whether his spirits
are up or down."

But his spirits were not often down in those days. The rooms at the back
no longer wore an air of loneliness, and the evenings never hung heavily
on his hands. In the course of a few months he sent to Brownsboro for a
high chair and tried the experiment of propping his small companion up in
it at his side when he ate his supper. It was an experiment which
succeeded very well and filled him with triumph. From her place in the
kitchen Mornin could hear during every meal the sound of conversation of
the most animated description. Tom's big, kind voice rambling cheerily
and replied to by the soft and unformed murmuring of the child. He was
never tired of her, never willing to give her up.

"What I might have given to others if they'd cared for it," was his
thought, "I give to her and she knows it."

It seemed too that she did know it, that from her