“Yes,” murmured Laurel.

“How are you, Laurel?” he asked.

“All right.”

“What sort of year has it been?”

“All right.”

Just the shortest, most conventional of questions—just the shortest, most non-committal of answers, but full of significance to them both; full of the promise of the dawning of the old sweet intimacy which never failed to steal over Laurel and her father, once they got rid of preliminaries, and to possess them like sunshine on a cloudless day, once it breaks through the mists and fogs of early morning.

Laurel’s father sat away as far as possible from her and surveyed her from top to toe. The close little toque with the red berries gave her a mature look that was unfamiliar. He sighed.

“You’re growing up, Lollie,” he said gently.

Whenever Laurel’s father called her Lollie, it always brought the vision of her mother sharply before her eyes. Her mother and father were the only two people in the world who had ever called her the silly little baby-name of Lollie—“Lolliepops” once it had been. She shoved the vision away as soon as possible. It hurt somehow. Her mother would have so loved the lights outside the taxicab window, and the taxicab too. She and her mother seldom afforded a taxicab.

“It’s my new hat that makes me look grown up,” said Laurel with never a reference to the creator of it. Laurel never mentioned her mother to her father. Some fine instinct within her kept her lips as sealed as his. “Don’t you like it?” she inquired, a little wistfully, for her father was still gazing at her with a sort of abstracted look which she didn’t comprehend.

“What? The hat? Oh, yes. I like the hat very much,” he assured her. “It’s very nice, and your suit too. I like your suit, Laurel. Only you’re growing up, and I don’t know that I like that. I don’t suppose I shall dare kiss you many years longer in the station before people,” he laughed. “Young ladies don’t like being kissed in public, I’m told.”

Laurel laughed, too—a nervous, pleased little laugh, and moved a little nearer.

“I’ve finished all the reading,” she confided to him proudly.

“You don’t mean all of it!”

“Yes, every book you put on the list,” she announced, eyes shining.

“Good work, Laurel.”

“Oh, it wasn’t work. I love to read.”

“Do you really?”

“I didn’t used to so much. It just seemed to come this year—liking it so, I mean.” She turned her face toward him. “When you read a book you like a lot,” she went on, “do you try to stop between sentences and look around and think it over, like eating a piece of candy just as slowly as you can, so it will last longer?”