t mean it, Nancy!" he says, hesitatingly, and with a sort of
look of shamed wonder in his friendly eyes.

"_Did_ not he?" (ironically).

A little pause, the position of the japanned candlestick and of Sir
Roger's hand still remaining the same. "_How_ I wish that _you_ were my
father instead!" I say with a sort of sob. He does not, as I fully
expect, say, "So do I!" and I go to bed, feeling rather small, as one
who has _gushed_, and whose gush has not been welcome to the recipient.

CHAPTER VI.

A fortnight has passed. Two Sundays, two Mondays, two Tuesdays, etc.
Fourteen times have I sleepily laid head on pillow. Fourteen times have
I yawningly raised it from my pillow. Fourteen times have I hungrily
eaten my dinner, since the night when I stood in the hall with Sir
Roger's hand in mine, raging against my parent. And Sir Roger is here
still. After all, there is nothing like the tenacity of boyish
friendship, is there?

I suppose that, to Sir Roger, father is still the manly, debonair youth
that he remembers thirty years ago. In happy ignorance he slurs over the
thirty intervening years of moroseness, and goes back to that blest
epoch in which I have so much difficulty in believing, and about which
he, walking beside me now and again through the tender, springing grass
of the meadows, has told me many a tale. For our promised walk has come
off, and so has many others like it.

He _must_ be dotingly fond of father. It is the 15th of April. I dare
say, O reader, that it seems to you much like any other date, but to me,
through every back-coming year, it seems to gain fresh significance--the
date that marks the most important day--take it for all in all--of my
life, though, whether for good or ill, who shall say, until I am dead,
and my life's sum reckoned up. I awake on that morning with no forecast
of what is coming? I tear myself from my morning dreams with as sleepy
unwillingness as usual. I eat my bread-and-butter with as stolidly
healthy an appetite. I run with as scampering feet, as evenly-beating a
heart as is my wont, with little Vick along the garden-walks, in the
royal morning sun. For one of God's own days has come--one that must
have lost his way, and strayed from paradise.

It has the steady heat of June, though we are only in mid-April, and the
freshness of the prune. The leaves on the trees are but tender and tiny,
and through them the sun sends his might. The tulips are all a-blaze and
a-sta