when you will
leave the nest, leave us voiceless, ridiculous, flitting among bare
branches. You will understand later, when you have children of your own.
This foolish talk about a husband! It is worse for a man than it is for
the woman. The mother lives again in her child: the man is robbed of
all."

"Dad, do you know how old I am?--that you are talking terrible nonsense?"

"He will come, little girl."

"Yes," answered Tommy, "I suppose he will; but not for a long while--oh,
not for a very long while. Don't. It frightens me."

"You? Why should it frighten you?"

"The pain. It makes me feel a coward. I want it to come; I want to
taste life, to drain the whole cup, to understand, to feel. But that is
the boy in me. I am more than half a boy, I always have been. But the
woman in me: it shrinks from the ordeal."

"You talk, Tommy, as if love were something terrible."

"There are all things in it; I feel it, dad. It is life in a single
draught. It frightens me."

The child was standing with her face hidden behind her hands. Old Peter,
always very bad at lying, stood silent, not knowing what consolation to
concoct. The shadow passed, and Tommy's laughing eyes looked out again.

"Haven't you anything to do, dad--outside, I mean?"

"You want to get rid of me?"

"Well, I've nothing else to occupy me till the proofs come in. I'm going
to practise, hard."

"I think I'll turn over my article on the Embankment," said Peter.

"There's one thing you all of you ought to be grateful to me for,"
laughed Tommy, as she seated herself at the piano. "I do induce you all
to take more fresh air than otherwise you would."

Tommy, left alone, set herself to her task with the energy and
thoroughness that were characteristic of her. Struggling with
complicated scales, Tommy bent her eyes closer and closer over the pages
of _Czerny's Exercises_. Glancing up to turn a page, Tommy, to her
surprise, met the eyes of a stranger. They were brown eyes, their
expression sympathetic. Below them, looking golden with the sunlight
falling on it, was a moustache and beard cut short in Vandyke fashion,
not altogether hiding a pleasant mouth, about the corners of which lurked
a smile.

"I beg your pardon," said the stranger. "I knocked three times. Perhaps
you did not hear me?"

"No, I didn't," confessed Tommy, closing the book of _Czerny's
Exercises_, and rising with chin at an angle that, to anyone acquainted
with t