growing smaller.

In her white night dress, with her hair in two long plaits, she looked at
herself once more. She seemed to be no one of any importance at all:
just a long little girl going to bed. With no one to kiss her good
night.

She blew out the candle and climbed into the big bed, feeling very
lonesome as she used to when a child. It had not troubled her until to-
night. Suddenly she sat up again. She needn't be back in London before
Tuesday evening, and to-day was only Friday. She would run down home and
burst in upon her father. He would be so pleased to see her.

She would make him put his arms around her.

CHAPTER VIII

She reached home in the evening. She thought to find her father in his
study. But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great
drawing-room. She opened the door softly. The room was dark save for a
flicker of firelight; she could see nothing. Nor was there any sound.

"Dad," she cried, "are you here?"

He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.

"It is you," he said. He seemed a little dazed.

She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.

"Give me a hug, Dad," she commanded. "A real hug."

He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in
his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.

"I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it," she laughed, when at last
he released her. "Do you know, you haven't hugged me, Dad, since I was
five years old. That's nineteen years ago. You do love me, don't you?"

"Yes," he answered. "I have always loved you."

She would not let him light the gas. "I have dined--in the train," she
explained. "Let us talk by the firelight."

She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the
floor between his knees. "What were you thinking of when I came in?" she
asked. "You weren't asleep, were you?"

"No," he answered. "Not that sort of sleep." She could not see his
face. But she guessed his meaning.

"Am I very like her?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered. "Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for
just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. I thought, for the
moment, as you stood there by the door . . . " He did not finish the
sentence.

"Tell me about her," she said. "I never knew she had been an actress."

He did not ask her how she had learnt it. "She gave it up when we were
married," he sai