w?"

"My father is dead, sir."

He turned his face away from her, and pressed both hands on his breast,
as if he had felt some dreadful pain there, and was trying to hide
it. But he mastered the pain; and he said a strange thing to her--very
gently, but still it was strange. He wished to know who had told her
that her father was dead.

"Grandmamma told me."

"Do you remember what grandmamma said?"

"Yes--she told me papa was drowned at sea."

He said something to himself, and said it twice over. "Not her mother!
Thank God, not her mother!" What did he mean?

Kitty looked and looked at him, and wondered and wondered. He put his
arm round her. "Come near to me," he said. "Don't be afraid of me, my
dear." She moved nearer and showed him that she was not afraid. The poor
man seemed hardly to understand her. His eyes grew dim; he sighed like a
person in distress; he said: "Your father would have kissed you, little
one, if he had been alive. You say I am like your father. May I kiss
you?"

She put her hands on his shoulder and lifted her face to him. In the
instant when he kissed her, the child knew him. Her heart beat suddenly
with an overpowering delight; she started back from his embrace. "That's
how papa used to kiss me!" she cried. "Oh! you _are_ papa! Not drowned!
not drowned!" She flung her arms round his neck, and held him as if she
would never let him go again. "Dear papa! Poor lost papa!" His tears
fell on her face; he sobbed over her. "My sweet darling! my own little
Kitty!"

The hysterical passion that had overcome her father filled her with
piteous surprise. How strange, how dreadful that he should cry--that
he should be so sorry when she was so glad! She took her little
handkerchief out of the pocket of her pinafore, and dried his eyes. "Are
you thinking of the cruel sea, papa? No! the good sea, the kind, bright,
beautiful sea that has given you back to me, and to mamma--!"

They had forgotten her mother!--and Kitty only discovered it now. She
caught at one of her father's hands hanging helpless at his side, and
pulled at it as if her little strength could force him to his feet.
"Come," she cried, "and make mamma as happy as I am!"

He hesitated. She sprang on his knee; she pressed her cheek against his
cheek with the caressing tenderness, familiar to him in the first happy
days when she was an infant. "Oh, papa, are you going to be unkind to me
for the first time in your life?"

His momentary re